Canongate buys exposé on the exploited workers powering AI

Canongate has seized Humans of AI by Mark Graham, Callum Cant and James Muldoon. The book tells the stories of "the global army of underpaid and exploited workers powering artificial intelligence". 

Editorial director Simon Thorogood pre-empted world rights excluding North America from Will Francis at Janklow & Nesbit, and Canongate will publish in the UK in July 2024.

Featuring over a decade of fieldwork, the book centres the people and the systems that make AI possible. The book will aim to "expose the hidden global human workforce that contributes to AI and reveals how this essential work is often deliberately concealed". 

The authors work together at Fairwork, a project established to highlight how new technologies are being used in the workplace. The trio said: "We are very excited to be working with Canongate to bring these neglected stories to a wider audience...The book interrogates how AI is reinforcing, rather than combatting, patterns of inequality with long and dark histories, and what kind of systemic change we need to fight back."

Thorogood added: "As soon as I read Mark, Callum and James’ proposal my immediate response was: this is something everyone should know. It is a revelation. We all felt an urgency to get this book into the world. It won’t just change how you think about AI and Big Tech but open your eyes to a global network of labour inequality that we are all in the West benefitting from, even if we don’t know it.”