By Guardian staff reporter
Publication Date: 2025-11-22 14:00:00
KRista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion on the ethics of artificial intelligence. As an AI employee at Amazon Mechanical Turk — a marketplace that allows companies to hire employees to perform tasks like entering data or matching an AI prompt with its output — Pawloski spends her time moderating and evaluating the quality of AI-generated text, images and videos, as well as doing some fact-checking.
About two years ago, while working from home at her dining room table, she took on the job of classifying tweets as racist or not. When presented with a tweet that read, “Listen to the Mooncricket chant,” she almost clicked the “No” button before deciding to check the meaning of the word “Mooncricket,” which, to her surprise, was a racial slur against black Americans.
“I sat there and thought about how many times I may have made the same mistake and not caught myself,” Pawloski said.
The potential magnitude of their own mistakes and those of thousands…