THEIR EYES

How does a machine learn to read the world? Testimonies and screen recordings introduce the experience of online micro-workers from the Global South: their job is to teach the AI of self-driving cars to navigate the streets of the Global North. As they investigate the images they receive from the US, they imagine micro-strategies in order to organise and hack back the system by exploiting their hands and eyes.
THEIR EYES explores the daily reality of online micro-workers from Venezuela, Kenya and The Philippines, who annotate images for self-driving cars. It investigates the power asymmetries and neocolonialist exploitation involved in the human labor necessary to train AI systems. The film reveals the invisible work that helps shape how machines read our world. Yet, far from solely focusing on the exploitation of this system, the film emphasises the agency and the know-how of the workers, as well as the different micro-strategies by which they make a bit more sense of this alienating work and try to organise collectively to alleviate some of their working conditions. THEIR EYES reveals the blind spot in current AI systems which ignore the extractivism they are built upon. Through this, it thus also raises the question of how to reappropriate these technological images which depict and categorise the world we live in without our prior knowledge or consent.