Data Workers’ Inquiry (DWI) is a global, radically participatory research initiative that places the people who build AI at the center of conversations about technology, labor, and justice. The project invites data workers—including annotators, content moderators, and other AI workers—to become community researchers who investigate their own workplaces, identify urgent issues, and use creative and collective techniques to communicate their experiences.

The resulting pieces live in the DWI repository, which brings together a growing collection of short animations, zines, comics, reports, podcasts, and a documentary produced by data workers across the world. The pieces address precarious labor conditions, exploitative and opaque AI workflows, surveillance at work, exposure to harmful content, and the unequal power relations shaping the AI industry. At the same time, they document practices of organizing, solidarity, resistance, and mutual support emerging among workers themselves. The repository operates as a living archive of collective experiences and struggles, making visible the workers whose labor remains largely hidden behind AI technologies.

Since its launch in 2024, 33 data workers across 15 countries have joined the project as community researchers, contributing perspectives from Kenya, Syria, Brazil, the Philippines, Germany, and beyond. The repository currently contains 22 pieces. Together, these works challenge dominant narratives of AI as an autonomous or purely technical achievement by foregrounding the human labor, judgment, and emotional toll that sustain contemporary AI technologies.

Data Workers’ Inquiry functions as a cultural and political platform. All materials are openly licensed and can be reused by educators, journalists, artists, researchers, and organizers. The project has also supported labor organizing efforts, including the TikTok moderators’ strike in Berlin, the African Content Moderators Union, and the Data Labelers Association in Kenya, while bringing data workers’ testimonies into policy spaces such as the European Parliament and the German Bundestag.

Thanks to: Adio-Adet Dinika, Camilla Salim Wagner, Laurenz Sachenbacher, Krystal Kauffman, Richard Methenge, Mophat Okinyi, Joan Kinyua, Kauna Malgwi, Oskarina Fuentes, Michael Asia, Wilington Shitawa, Botlhokwa Ranta, Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan, Roukaya al-Hammada, Yasser Alrayes, Alexis Chávez, James Oyange, Horacio Espinosa, Sakine Mohamadi Bozorg. 
 
Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) through the Weizenbaum Institute, and by Ford Foundation through the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).

Milagros Miceli (AR) is Research Lead at the DAIR Institute, Director of the Data, Algorithmic Systems, and Ethics group at Weizenbaum-Institut, and lecturer at TU Berlin. Her work investigates the labor, politics, and ethics of AI, with a particular focus on the hidden workforce that produces training datasets. She founded Data Workers’ Inquiry, an internationally recognized space for data workers to research and document their own labor conditions within AI supply chains. In 2025, TIME named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI.

Data Workers’ Inquiry is a participatory research initiative that reconfigures how knowledge about digital labor is produced and circulated. Centered on those who sustain AI systems, including data annotators, content moderators, and platform maintenance workers, the project shifts research agency toward individuals whose contributions remain largely invisible within data-driven infrastructures. By inviting data workers to act as community researchers, it enables participants to define their own questions, identify concerns, and communicate findings through diverse formats, operating at the intersection of labor, technological literacy, and collective, situated knowledge production. Since its launch, the project has engaged participants across 13 countries, forming a distributed network spanning Kenya, Syria, Latin America, and Europe, enabling knowledge to flow from the Global South towards centers of power.
The jury recognizes Data Workers’ Inquiry as a compelling example of how participatory methodologies can interrogate the socio-technical conditions underpinning AI. By rendering visible the labor that sustains digital systems and fostering technological literacy, the project repositions data workers as central agents in shaping the narratives, ethics, and futures of AI.