GHOST is a winning project from the Good Interventions Economic Design Exhibition hosted by Parsons School of Design in NYC. The project examines the interconnections and juxtaposition between human labor and artificial intelligence in platform economies.

Every minute, millions of pieces of content are shared on social media platforms but not all this content reaches the end user. The content is analyzed, filtered, deleted or archived by imperceptible policies of social media platforms and people whose agendas, motivations, and actions are usually intentionally obscured. The invisible human labor behind content moderation is a type of gig employment called Ghost Work.

Through this project, I propose to spread awareness of the problem of the invisible underpaid human labor powering artificial intelligence systems. The under-surface low-wage gig work makes the platform economy run smoothly, letting corporations mislead the entire world by praising the achievements of the supposed artificial intelligence systems and hiding their true nature. Exploited workers such as data labellers or content moderators are exposed to the most dangerous online content, are constantly monitored and punished while facing trauma on a daily basis and perform what’s supposed to be actions of the sophisticated computer system.

The project is accomplished as a textile artwork that lifts the veil on the invisible matter of the global platform underclass and echoes the term ghost work. Hand-painted on semi-opaque silk fabric - to resemble the fact of obscurity - and then carefully disassembled thread by thread illustrating content that is being deleted. It leaves a hint that this content is not gone but rather stored and kept somewhere, guarded out of sight and forever imprinted in the ghost worker's memory.

When not the image itself but the impression of that image is left.