James Muldoon is a sociologist who writes about the changing nature of human-technology relationships. Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Our Relationships investigates how people form emotional attachments with large language models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I., co-written by fellow researchers Mark Graham and Callum Cant and based on more than a decade of fieldwork, follows Global South workers whose knowledge and labor are the basis of AI tools and assistants.

“A lot of people see artificial intelligence as something that is largely automated, frictionless, and just appears as a useful tool for us. But most of the human hours that go into making artificial intelligence possible are not done in labs in Google or OpenAI. The majority of the work is actually very piecemeal 'data annotation' work, which is outsourced to various locations in the Global South, everywhere from India to East Africa to the Philippines,” explains Muldoon.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the production process, consumers are increasingly turning to artificial chatbots to fulfill social needs, incentivizing tech companies to amplify the “addictive and manipulative, controlling behaviors” embedded into their systems to keep users increasingly dependent on their products. “We need much stricter regulation to stop these companies … that can get people hooked and give people harmful and dangerous advice,” says Muldoon.