Hi! My name is D., and I work in Verstka’s data department. I’m an anonymous author, b...

Hi! My name is D., and I work in Verstka’s data department. I’m an anonymous author, but here’s a fun fact about me: the reels I most often forward to colleagues are sketches about how sick everyone is of AI.

I really am very conservative (a boomer) and I absolutely cannot stand the aggressive imposition of process automation where it’s quicker and easier to use human intelligence. But what’s even worse! AI-generated cat reels. Or posts written by Chat GPT? I can’t decide.

If you think too (also?) that a superintelligence will enslave us in the next few years, now is the perfect time to learn that just the other day at Verstka we published a major investigation that we made with the help of AI.

Together with my developer colleague and scientists from the University of Helsinki, we found out how people are tried in Russia for violence against children. But don’t think we just dumped everything into AI and published the result. Sadly, no!

We worked on the investigation from September of last year. And for the language model to be able to analyze 6,000 cases properly, we spent many hours on manual labeling, writing the prompt, looking for errors, editing the prompt, looking for errors, editing again, and so on many times over. I’ll leave fact-checking, calls, approvals, and other pleasant things outside the frame.

At this point, as our SMM specialist suggests, it’s time to ask you to support our work. And I agree with her. What we did is the work of the state. It is the state that should collect and publish honest statistics. It’s not the first time, and not the last, that independent journalism has had to stand in for the state.

If you, like me, believe that society should know the truth, because how can things be improved if we don’t know what they are actually like, support Verstka’s work:

Any amount matters and will go toward paying for the working hours of real people, like me :) (and buying food for their cats)