Google has used us all as free digital librarians - without asking: David Richards

You have proved nothing of the sort. You have done a job. And you have not been paid for it.

I did not think much about this until recently, when I discovered what had really been happening for 15 years. Hundreds of millions of us have been quietly working for one of the most valuable companies on earth, with no contract, no pay, and no meaningful disclosure. Just a gate that would not open until we had done the work.

The story begins at the turn of the millennium, when spam bots were overwhelming the internet and websites needed a way to tell humans from machines.

A Carnegie Mellon professor, Luis von Ahn, solved it with CAPTCHA, distorted text that humans could read and machines could not. Then came the twist.

In 2007 he launched reCAPTCHA, and it was ingenious. It showed you two words: one a known control to verify your humanity, the other scanned from a real book that computers had failed to decipher. Your answer transcribed it.

You thought you were logging in. You were doing the work of a digital librarian. Google acquired the company in 2009 and deployed it against the New York Times archive, 13 million articles back to 1851, and then Google Books. By 2011 the job was largely done.

Then the work changed. Around 2013, the distorted words were replaced by image grids sourced from Google Street View. Every click told a machine what a traffic light looks like, where a pedestrian crossing begins, where a road ends. You were not passing a test. You were annotating data for free.

At its peak, more than 200 million of these challenges were completed every day. A 2023 study by the University of California, Irvine calculated that reCAPTCHA had extracted 819 million hours of unpaid human labour, worth six billion dollars in wages never paid. What did it build?

Among other things, Waymo, Google’s self-driving car business, now valued at $45 billion, its vehicles built on data you spent years providing for free.

The ethical question is not comfortable. This was not voluntary labour in any meaningful sense. It was embedded into infrastructure you could not avoid if you wanted to participate in modern life. We would not accept this in the physical world.

Imagine being stopped at a supermarket entrance and told you could only go in if you spent ten seconds doing unpaid work for the owner. Every single time, for 15 years.

Today you often do not even see the test. reCAPTCHA v3 watches how you move your mouse, how you scroll, how long you pause. Your behaviour itself is the training data. You are still working. You just cannot see the task.

I have spent 30 years in this industry, worked directly alongside the people who built this stuff in Silicon Valley, and advised governments on where it was heading. I did not know this was happening.

I told my son. He shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. “I just assumed that’s what they were doing.”

That exchange should stop us cold. I was oblivious. He took it for granted. No outcry. No class action. No parliamentary debate. Billions of hours of human labour extracted without a signature, a disclosure, or a penny in return.

We debate endlessly about what AI will do to us. But here is the truth nobody wants to say out loud: before the AI era has properly begun, we were already enslaved into building it.

Without consent. Without payment. Without even noticing. If that does not appal you, I am not sure what will.

David Richards MBE is managing partner of Yorkshire AI Labs