By Aisha Down
Publication Date: 2026-04-07 12:00:00
TTens of thousands of people have been paid by a company partly owned by Meta to train AI by crawling Instagram accounts, collecting copyrighted works and transcribing pornographic soundtracks, the Guardian can reveal.
Scale AI, which is 49% controlled by Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire, has recruited experts in fields such as medicine, physics and business – presumably to refine cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems through a platform called Outlier. “Become the expert that AI learns from,” says the website, promoting flexible work for people with good qualifications.
However, employees of the platform said they were involved in the exploitation of a range of other people’s personal data – an exercise they said was morally uncomfortable and markedly different from the sophistication of high-level systems.
Outlier is managed by Scale AI, which has contracts with the Pentagon and US defense contractors.
Its CEO, Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, was described…
