‘In the end, you feel blank’: India’s female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI; The Guardian, February 5, 2026

Anuj Behal, The Guardian ; ‘In the end, you feel blank’: India’s female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI

[Kip Currier: The largely unaddressed plight of content moderators became more real for me after reading this haunting 9/9/24 piece in the Washington Post, "I quit my job as a content moderator. I can never go back to who I was before."

As mentioned in the graphic article's byline, content moderator Alberto Cuadra spoke with journalist Beatrix Lockwood. Maya Scarpa's illustrations poignantly give life to Alberto Cuadra's first-hand experiences and ongoing impacts from the content moderation he performed for an unnamed tech company. I talk about Cuadra's experiences and the ethical issues of content moderation, social media, and AI in my Ethics, Information, and Technology book.]

[Excerpt]

"Murmu, 26, is a content moderator for a global technology company, logging on from her village in India’s Jharkhand state. Her job is to classify images, videos and text that have been flagged by automated systems as possible violations of the platform’s rules.

On an average day, she views up to 800 videos and images, making judgments that train algorithms to recognise violence, abuse and harm.

This work sits at the core of machine learning’s recent breakthroughs, which rest on the fact that AI is only as good as the data it is trained on. In India, this labour is increasingly performed by women, who are part of a workforce often described as “ghost workers”.

“The first few months, I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I would close my eyes and still see the screen loading.” Images followed her into her dreams: of fatal accidents, of losing family members, of sexual violence she could not stop or escape. On those nights, she says, her mother would wake and sit with her...

“In terms of risk,” she says, “content moderation belongs in the category of dangerous work, comparable to any lethal industry.”

Studies indicate content moderation triggers lasting cognitive and emotional strain, often resulting in behavioural changes such as heightened vigilance. Workers report intrusive thoughts, anxiety and sleep disturbances.

A study of content moderators published last December, which included workers in India, identified traumatic stress as the most pronounced psychological risk. The study found that even where workplace interventions and support mechanisms existed, significant levels of secondary trauma persisted."