I think if a certain HN crowd doesn’t like the phrasing of “AI colonialism,” just substitute in “capitalism” and maybe it’ll sit better with your personal opinion (for better or worse).
Definition: Colonialism is the practice by which a state or power extends and maintains political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a foreign territory and its people.
So yes, at scale, a rich country (political domination) employing people en masse in the developing world (economic domination), in this case showing them a slideshow of all the objectionable content westerners share, is colonialism.
The fact that it even exists as an option to simply "export" undesirable tasks to people overseas that you don't see and don't care about is itself an extension of and the maintenance of colonialism.
Their local environments are being destroyed, city and state governance corrupted, regular jobs muscled out, electricity used exorbitantly, psyches damaged, and so much more all in the name of extracting low-cost labor from the less privileged — and thus readily exploited — halfway across the globe, but sure, definitely not colonialism.
Colonialism doesn't mean you make people do back-breaking manual labor; it means you exploit people far away to extract capital from where they are so people nearby can enjoy the fruits of others without having to do the work themselves.
To the extent these claims are true (and I'm sure that varies by location), those are the primary problems, not the fact that people are being offered jobs they seem to prefer to other jobs.
- I would say that extracting capital from labor does not constitute "slavery" in the sense of either de facto or de jure "ownership" of humans, but a wider interpretation of the word may apply.
- Exploitation doesn't have to be fraud. People can be willingly exploited. If we imagine for the sake of argument that human suffering can be quantified, and we imagine a person who starts from a place of, say, a 10 on an arbitrary scale where that's pretty bad (and 0 is no suffering), they may "choose" to take a job that reduces their suffering to an 8. Despite the reduction in suffering, someone else benefits from this arrangement more than the suffering human, and the benefited person could have chosen to reduce the suffering further but for the increase of their profit. This is still exploitation, even if the sufferer was made aware of all the circumstances up front.
- I said that the people's psyches were damaged; nothing about "psychic damage". One example of damage to the psyche is being asked to classify images of CSAM for eight hours a day. Regardless of the pay, this causes damage to people with even the barest shred of empathy.
[0] I might point you to Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". Leaving aside the author's intent, there are some chapters in the latter parts of the book replete with references to such events.
To be fair, that's pretty explicitly what the organisation hosting it is all about.
I don’t know why academics think that uttering the right words will actually change anything, they’re not Gandalf.