A first-person investigative report published in December 2025 by Michael Geoffrey Abuyabo Asia, a Kenyan ex-chat moderator and Secretary General of the Data Labelers Association (DLA), documents the psychological and structural harms experienced by gig workers hired to impersonate fabricated romantic and sexual personas on AI companion platforms. Asia, whose career took him from Nairobi Aviation College through data labeling roles at Sama, CloudFactory, TELUS International, TransPerfect DataForce, Appen, and NMS Philippines, describes being paid as little as $0.05 per message to simultaneously maintain three to five fake identities — ranging from a 24-year-old lesbian college student to a 30-year-old gay man — under strict NDAs prohibiting disclosure of the work even to family members. The report, titled "The Quiet Cost of Emotional Labor," was funded by the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), the Weizenbaum Institute, and Technische Universität Berlin, and draws on interviews with seven of Asia's colleagues to build collective testimony about psychological trauma, identity erosion, and systemic invisibility.
What makes the situation more damaging than the pay rate alone: these workers were generating training data for the very systems built to replace them. Every fabricated expression of affection and manufactured personal detail became labeled behavioral data feeding the conversational models that workers were unknowingly helping to create. Platforms named in the report, including TextingFactory, Cloudworkers, and New Media Services, operate through deliberate subcontracting chains that fragment accountability across multiple corporate layers and jurisdictions, making enforceable worker protections structurally absent rather than merely overlooked.
Asia's account lands alongside a growing body of evidence — prior reporting on content moderation trauma in Africa, and research on ghostwork globally — that the psychological costs of human-in-the-loop AI systems fall disproportionately on workers in the Global South operating under precarious, NDA-bound conditions. The DLA, which Asia describes as "an anchor of solidarity," currently functions as an advocacy and testimony-gathering body rather than a formal trade union. It is early-stage by necessity: the deliberately fragmented architecture of gig work makes sustained labor formation structurally difficult. The report is available under Creative Commons BY 4.0 via the Data Workers' Inquiry at data-workers.org.