Madhumita Murgia on the good, bad and wonder of artificial intelligence

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Financial Times, tries to answer in her book Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI through 10 stories of individuals whose lives have been affected by AI and AI systems. These stories from across the world look at everyone from gig workers (systematically underpaid and undercut by AI algorithms) to doctors and activists (who are profiled using facial recognition AI). In India, we learn about a doctor using an AI app to analyse patient X-rays and estimate the risk of tuberculosis.

Elsewhere, Murgia documents AI sweatshops in Nairobi, Kenya where young workers categorise and label graphic text and snippets (that describe child sexual abuse, murder, suicide, and other harmful topics), which help train AI engines to identify, block and filter such user queries. They also screen distressing content for clients like Meta, the social media giant that owns Facebook and Instagram. She touches upon the trauma that content moderators face after viewing hours and hours of such content.

As the book illustrates, it is this outsourced work that ensures AI recommendation engines on social media apps don’t spew poisonous content. Murgia was clear that she wanted to look beyond Silicon Valley which, as she says in the book, is the nexus of technological power. “I wanted to travel and bring to life stories from places that other people don’t...

I wanted to be as geographically broad as possible," says Murgia, who was recently in India to promote her book, in an interview with Lounge. “The most challenging part was figuring out who would make the best stories. Because in many cases, people are either unaware that they’ve been affected by AI systems, or if they’re aware, and if they’ve been harmed by it, they don’t want to talk about