Swiss students train artificial intelligences | Press review n°17
I selected important news on artificial intelligence during the week of July 28 to August 3, 2025. Here's my commentary.
Welcome to the seventeenth press review of Artificial reality. This week I focused on a US-based AI company recruiting in Switzerland, on surveillance capitalism, and on tech billionaires' bunkers. Have a good read!
📰 Read
Swiss students train artificial intelligences
Outlier, a US company specializing in data annotation, is recruiting students in Switzerland to train artificial intelligence systems. They work without a work contract or social benefits, reports Le Temps in an article published Sunday.
Data annotation is the process of adding information to data in order to allow AI models to interpret it correctly. This includes classifying images into different categories or writing comments to describe certain characteristics of texts, for example the opinions or emotions they express. An indispensable “grunt work” that is generally done at low cost in countries of the Global South.
Outlier is a subsidiary of Scale AI, one of the major companies in the field of data annotation which was partially acquired by Meta for $14.3 billion in June. It currently recruits Swiss students via the professional social network LinkedIn for data labeling, proofreading or evaluating responses generated by AI models.
These tasks done at home are compensated up to 45 dollars per hour and are paid weekly via a PayPal account. While these working conditions may seem advantageous, they also come with drawbacks.
An account sometimes “desperately empty”
Students recruited by Outlier don’t receive a formal employment contract nor social security contributions, a practice denounced by Rémy Wyler, lawyer and professor of labor law at the University of Lausanne. He argues that the rise of digital platforms like Outlier “should not serve as a pretext to dismantle the social protection of workers, built over decades in Switzerland.”
The workload varies significantly, as Florian testifies in Le Temps. “Certain weeks, the missions are numerous and well paid. Others, the account stays desperately empty,” he laments. This is therefore only part-time work but not a full-time job.
Maude, also hired by Outlier, regrets that the mandatory training before the first missions is not paid, despite Outlier's promises. To make the time invested worthwhile, it is therefore necessary to perform tasks without interruption. Otherwise, students may be excluded and must then undergo training again.
Outlier operates with a certain opacity: no human interlocutor, no clear supervision, everything is done through the company’s platform or sometimes via a forum. Strict rules are nevertheless applied. Even minor infractions, such as connecting from a foreign country while traveling, can result in a permanent ban, without the possibility to appeal the decision. Legally, “this case could be assimilated to an unjustified immediate termination,” explains Rémy Wyler.
The company has in fact been accused of not always paying its workers correctly, according to Inc. and TechCrunch.
An unclear strategy
The missions proposed by Outlier are simple and “anyone can do them,” says Florian. A surprising observation, given that Outlier praises the work of its “experts” on its website. In that case, why does the company recruit qualified individuals in Switzerland when it could focus on countries with lower wages?
Paola Tubaro, research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), thinks that the presence of well-trained young Swiss people within Outlier’s teams could serve as a message to investors: “Look, we work with specialized Swiss talents.” However, she emphasizes that it is only a hypothesis at this point because the practice of employing highly skilled people in Europe is a very recent phenomenon.
Outlier claims to have more than 100,000 “experts” around the world but the number of its workers in Switzerland is unknown. Scale AI, Outlier’s parent company, did not want to comment on this point.
Seven important news this week
Palantir Is Extending Its Reach Even Further Into Government (Wired)
OpenAI killed a ChatGPT feature that made some sensitive conversations publicly searchable (The Verge)
YouTube to gauge US users’ ages with AI after UK and Australia add age checks (The Guardian)
Google says it will sign EU’s AI code of practice (TechCrunch)
Trump’s AI plan is a massive handout to gas and chemical companies (The Verge)
Mark Zuckerberg Details Meta’s Plan for Self-Improving, Superintelligent AI (Wired)
How AI is impacting 700 professions — and might impact yours (The Washington Post)
Read the other articles of the week I have selected by clicking here.
🎥 Watch
Behind the scenes of surveillance capitalism
In a video published on Monday, journalist Taylor Lorenz explores the controversial universe of data brokers, who are key players in the digital surveillance happening on the internet.
She explains how the companies of this global industry, which was valued at $389 billion in 2024, collect personal data on billions of internet users in order to create very precise profiles that they can then sell to advertisers, governments and the police. A trend that has intensified since the advent of social media, where users themselves publish personal - and sometimes sensitive - data, which further fuel this industry.
“By the early 2010s, search engines, email providers, online retailers, streaming platforms, news sites, and social networks of course were all gathering non-stop data from users almost 24/7. People had no idea how much of their lives had suddenly become visible to companies just in a matter of years. They didn’t even know what data was collected, how long that data would be stored, who had access to it, or what it was being used to decide.
From the perspective of the user, the internet seemed like this amazing new place full of freedom and discovery and it felt so exciting to share your entire life with the world, but behind the scenes the data brokering industry was building this industrial-scale surveillance system.”
- Taylor Lorenz
Your Phone Isn't Listening, Here's What's Actually Happening
Data brokers infringe upon privacy
In this video published on Saturday by Ted Talks, lawyer Eliza Orlins explains that data brokers in the United States sell personal data to the police or prosecutors without a warrant, which goes against the right to privacy which is protected by the fourth amendment to the US Constitution.
“Everything you’ve ever uploaded, every like, every comment, even disappearing stories, and your private messages, legally no longer belongs to you. And what about AI chatbots like ChatGPT? Every conversation you have is being recorded and could one day be used against you in a court of law. Your late night curiosities or hypothetical scenarios, they could be misunderstood and misrepresented against you.”
- Eliza Orlins
Universal surveillance is here—how do we fight back?
Seven important videos this week
Sam Altman Warns: Privacy Does Not Apply To ChatGPT (Breaking Points)
The UK Just Censored The Entire Internet (Taylor Lorenz)
Palantir and the Conspiracy to Own Everything: The Largest Heist in History (Epoch Philosophy)
How AI Became the New Dot-Com Bubble (Economy Media)
The Internet is Dying: AI, Bots, and The End of Human Content (Vanessa Wingårdh)
Le deuxième volet de l'IA Act est entré en vigueur ce samedi au sein de l'UE (France 24)
Watch the other videos of the week I have selected by clicking here.
🔈 Listen
The bunkers of tech CEOs
In a new episode of the Dystopia Now podcast, Kate Willet and Émile Torres address recent news on tech and artificial intelligence.
They discuss the fact that Big Tech companies in the United States will work with the Trump administration to build “a digital health ecosystem” assisted by AI and the risks that this represents, especially in terms of surveillance and privacy protections.
They also talk about the bunkers that many tech CEOs had built to protect themselves in case of an ecological collapse, a nuclear war or major social crises.
Listen to Dystopia Now on Pocket Casts
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Have a good week,
Arnaud