Prison inmates in Finland are behind AI data, working for €4,65 per day

Prison inmates in Finland are behind AI data, working for €4,65 per day to release millions of content materials to the rest of the world; given one of the most laborious jobs in the modern labour market, for better or worse.

Finland´s prison inmates work for the AI

For the past two years, Finnish prison inmates have been employed as data labellers to improve AI services, spending their prison sentences in long sessions of labelling and classifying data. This initiative was proposed by Finland´s data company Metroc, who had approached the Finnish Prison and Probation Service with the idea. Their aim, as they claimed, was to reduce reoffending by teaching inmates digital skills to increase their chances of getting hired.

Nordic prisons have always been ahead of mirroring real-life conditions for prisoners, following the “normality principle,” which improves productivity and well-being. Imagine being sentenced to 10 years of prison and coming out to see the shiny new iPhones and AI robots, while trying to find a job; a challenge, no doubt.

With the initiative, the Smart Prison programme, which oversees the project, aims to ease inmates´ transition back into society. “This data work with computers is future-oriented, forward-looking,” said Tuukka Lehtiniemi, a researcher at the University of Helsinki who joined to motor the project.

As the Finnish language is spoken by only five million people worldwide, there is a dire need for human input into the AI systems;  “As our software tries to interpret text material and different details about deconstruction products, we need to teach the (AI) language models to understand the Finnish language and to understand const4ruction context and construction questions and topics,” said Jussi Virnala, Metroc founder.

One of the participants, nicknamed Robin, said to Euronews, who were investigating the project, that he chose the work “to spend time for meaningful activities,” adding, “Artificial Intelligence was a new topic for me, and it aroused my interest. Also to get money.”

AI work is better in prisons than in the outside world

“The compensation is exactly the same as for those prisoners doing any other type of prison work,” explained Pio Puolakka, project manager of Smart Prison. Preferred to physical labour, the inmates earn €4,65 per day providing AI with data. When first launched, the programme paid the prisoners €1,54 per day, before realising the tiresome nature of the job, which can only be compared to delving into a global mind and filtering out the rights from wrongs.

This type of work has been previously criticised for being exploitative, especially in large companies like Google and OpenAI; claimed an easy source of cheap labour. The researcher of the project, Lehtiniemi, however, explained to the Press that in such a highly regulated environment as prison, there are no chances of the “excessive or exploitative things that you could imagine happening with the project…It´s not the Wild West that tech companies can just start exploiting.”

The realities of the inmates´ lives were also emphasised; “We have to remember that comparing the open labour market to what prisoners are doing in prison is not the same situation. Prisoners don´t have to pay for their living or food.” Now, imagine if they did and if they were paid as little as €1,18 per hour. This was the case with Kenyan employees for the data labelling firm, Sama, as revealed by Time Magazine in 2023.

The same case was discovered by Wired, who investigated the job in South America and East Asia, finding that people worked 18 hours a day to learn less than their country´s minimum wage. Anthropologist Mary Gray, exploring the ethical concerns of AI labour, called the employees hired to manage AI, “ghost workers,” which, for those isolated in prisons, couldn´t be closer to reality.

Yet researchers of the initiative reported that “most wanted to continue” the job when given the chance, in prison.

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