Marché Arends

Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves

Hi, I’m Marché - a freelance investigative journalist from South Africa. I’m injured, largely immobile, and fighting for a spinal surgery my medical aid refuses to pay for.

Marché Arends reposted

@imaginaries.bsky.social

26 Mar

The fourth article in our @hypestudies.bsky.social series at at @techpolicypress.bsky.social is out. Brilliant work by @marche.bsky.social and Kathy Cleary exposing how AI hype obfuscates the extractive practices behind training and labelling LLMs.

Justin Hendrix@justinhendrix.bsky.social

What is marketed as AI “innovation” is, in practice, a consolidation of global labor hierarchies and a commodification of African knowledge, write Marché Arends and Kathryn Cleary, drawing on their year-long investigation supported by the Pulitzer Center and published by Africa Uncensored.

techpolicy.pressHow AI Hype Masks the Exploitation of African WorkersAI is a consolidation of labor hierarchies, a plunder of African skills, and a commodification of African knowledge, write Marché Arends and Kathryn Cleary.

tinyurl.comHow AI Hype Masks the Exploitation of African WorkersAI is a consolidation of labor hierarchies, a plunder of African skills, and a commodification of African knowledge, write Marché Arends and Kathryn Cleary.

New article out in @techpolicypress.bsky.social: 'How AI Hype Masks the Exploitation of African Workers' Read it here: tinyurl.com/4s2u68px AI hype isn’t marketing, it’s a cover story disguising exploitation as "progress" and reframing colonial extraction as "innovation". Let’s break it down 🧵

11. Exploitation isn’t destiny. But naming it does help to restore agency, enabling communities to shape futures designed with them, not for them. #Agency #Justice #AI

12. Thanks to @hypestudies.bsky.social for the opportunity to get really angry in public about a topic we care intensely about. Remember, folks: "The colonial project never ended -- it just got better PR." #Agency #Justice #AI

9. That promise is dressed up as progress. It hides extraction while power and money gather at the top, leaving workers in precarity. #TechColonialism #HiddenLabour

10. Hype is performed on social media platforms, repeated and amplified until it looks like proof. #AI #SocialMedia #TechHype

7. This staging isn’t about the work itself. It’s about creating the appearance of endless supply to keep hype alive and speculation flowing. #AIHype #Labour #GlobalSouth

8. Speculation drives the system. Value isn’t about what workers deliver today, but about promises made for what might be delivered tomorrow. #SpeculativeCapitalism #AIHype

5. Recruitment drives promise abundance -- tens of thousands of jobs -- but often deliver little actual work. #LabourHedging #Speculation

6. Idle workers are staged as proof of “capacity.” This is labour hedging: human beings used as collateral to attract investors. #GigEconomy #SpeculativeCapitalism

3. Behind the hype are African gig workers. They train large language models, correcting errors and providing insight and oversight at every stage of development. #DigitalLabour #GlobalSouth

4. These workers are paid below‑subsistence wages, their expertise appropriated, and their labour treated as disposable. #Exploitation #GigWork #GlobalSouth

1. AI hype works by declaring inevitability. It tells us AI is “transformative” and “revolutionary,” disciplining belief before reality catches up. #AI #TechOligarchy

2. That framing isn’t neutral. It makes exploitation look natural, necessary, normal and even aspirational. #AfricanDigitalWorkers #DigitalColonialism

Hi, I’m Marché - a freelance investigative journalist from South Africa. I’m injured, largely immobile, and fighting for a spinal surgery my medical aid refuses to pay for.

Thank you for reading this far. I hope wherever in the world you are, you are safe and surrounded by kindness.

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Hi, I’m Marché - a freelance investigative journalist from South Africa. I’m injured, largely immobile, and fighting for a spinal surgery my medical aid refuses to pay for.

If you’re able to donate, thank you so much. If you aren’t, I completely get it - the world is on fire, and we’re all just hanging on for dear life. If you're able to share this with your network, I thank you as well.

If you know me or anything about me, you know I’m stubborn AF. I will not let this injury steal my life from me; a life I loved and worked hard for.

Hi, I’m Marché - a freelance investigative journalist from South Africa. I’m injured, largely immobile, and fighting for a spinal surgery my medical aid refuses to pay for.

I’ve been patching things together for a while now, but the bills keep coming faster than I can keep track of. The reality is that I can't work properly until I heal.

So, I’ve launched a fundraising campaign. It’s not to pay for the surgery itself. It’s to keep me afloat - rent, bills, medical appointments, and pain medication - while I continue to fight for it. Here is the link: www.backabuddy.co.za/campaign/hel...

Global Investigative Journalism Network

12 Nov 2025

I feel like everyone is under some kind of bullshit spell that makes them believe in (and defend) AGI. AGI ISN'T REAL AND CHASING IT IS CAUSING IMMEASURABLE HARM. Please, I beg of you, stop waiting for a unicorn. And also, for those who haven't heard: Santa isn't real either. 🙄 Ugh, I'm tired 🤦‍♀️

Marché Arends reposted

@gijn.org

5 Sept 2025

This week’s Top 10 Data Journalism column highlights, curated by Hanna Duggal for GIJN 🧵👇 Full story:

twp.aigijn.orgWhere Plane Crash Survivors Sit, African Labor Fueling AI Hype, DOGE Guts US Health Agency, Syria’s Most Feared Prison

pulitzercenter.orgFuelling the AGI Hype: The Recruitment Playbook To Land Big Tech ContractsOn the surface, the South African job market looks busy; scrolling through jobs on LinkedIn reveals hundreds, sometimes thousands, of job postings for “AI tutors” or “AI trainers” from micro-tasking.....

6 Sept 2025

Thanks @gijn.org and Hannah Duggal for including our story in this week's Top 10 Data Journalism column!

Global Investigative Journalism Network@gijn.org

Africa Uncensored exposes how companies hire thousands as AI 'tutors' to train large language model responses (LLMs) — not to sustain livelihoods, but to look scalable to investors. In South Africa, many workers had no steady income despite the hype. https://twp.ai/kuqEIn @marche.bsky.social

Marché Arends reposted

Pulitzer Center

@pulitzercenter.org

2 Sept 2025

Thousands of workers promised digital jobs are being used as collateral in Big Tech’s race to build “super-intelligent AI.” AI Fellows @marche.bsky.social and Kathryn Cleary reveal how workers are lured into jobs with no pay and no work. Story for Africa Uncensored. 👉 bit.ly/4ncZ7lQ

Marché Arends reposted

Tan Hui Yee

@tanhuiyee.bsky.social

africauncensored.onlineFuelling the AGI hype: The Recruitment Playbook to land Big Tech contracts - Africa UncensoredAn investigation into the mass recruitment of "AI Tutors" and "AI Trainers" by micro-tasking companies reveals the deceptive and exploitative practices that these companies use, with false promises of...

"We employ the unemployable so be grateful you have a job." Great work by @marche.bsky.social on the hype behind "AI trainers" africauncensored.online/blog/2025/08...

Yesterday, our investigation dropped in Africa Uncensored about how human labour from the Global South is being leveraged by Big Tech as collateral in a gambling game of epic proportions. How? Through the mass recruitment of 'AI Trainers' or 'AI Tutors'. 🧵 africauncensored.online/blog/2025/08...

11) A thousand thank-yous to our wonderful @pulitzercenter.org colleagues who believed in us even when we struggled to believe in ourselves.

12) If you have any questions feel free to reach out! We'll also be publishing our methodology soon and are keen to engage.

9) Consider reading our story if you want to learn about what's underneath the hype, understand what's happening to you or someone close to you working as an 'AI Trainer', and perhaps even if you want to take informed action (you can't dismantle the machine if you don't know how the machine works).

10) Thank you to every single digital worker we spoke to who made time for us and our questions, who trusted us with the vulnerable stories of their lived experience, and who reminded us that the revolution will be worker-led.

7) ...hire en-masse despite knowing there is no work, to create the illusion of scale. Why? Because scale is a signal to investors to keep investing, to keep pouring huge sums of money at an unprecedented rate into the AI machine.

8) There is a big chance that you already know, or will soon know, an 'AI Trainer'. But even if you don't, this high-risk-high-reward betting sport being played by billionaires on the global stage affects everyone who doesn't have a front-row seat to the game.

5) Millions of digital workers spend hours "training" Large Language Models like ChatGPT without credit, humane working conditions or fair pay (in some cases, no pay at all). But the truth is, without them, there would be no AI.

6) For a year, we studied the mass recruitment strategies of micro-tasking companies, like Mindrift, aimed at winning training contracts with Big Tech firms, like OpenAI. It was tricky to figure out at first, but once we did, we realized it was a pretty copy-paste strategy:

3) The answer to who loses is unsurprising but disturbing nonetheless: our investigation shows, in granular detail, how the bubble is growing off the back of exploited human labour from the Global South.

4)These digital workers, also known as 'AI Tutors' or 'AI Trainers', are not "invisible" as much reporting on AI describes them. Nope, these are real people with real lives, real families, real bills to pay, real skills, talents, needs, and very real dreams of a stable future.

1) You may have heard people talking about the 'AI bubble'. What started as a whisper is now a growing rumble as the world wakes up to the reality that the AI hype is exactly that -- hype. Dangerous, reckless and unsubstantiated hype.

2) We've been watching this bubble grow, asking ourselves: How? We were interested in what the scaffolding supporting the growth of this bubble looks like. More importantly, we wanted to know who loses when it all comes crashing down.

26 Aug 2025

Today, the investigation my reporting partner Kathryn Cleary and I have been working on for over a year is finally out in Africa Uncensored! africauncensored.online/blog/2025/08...