Artificial Intelligence-as-a-Service (AIaaS) empowers individuals and organisations to access AI on-demand, in either tailored or ‘off-the-shelf’ forms. However, institutional separation between development, training and deployment can lead to critical opacities, such as obscuring the level of human effort necessary to produce and train AI services. Information about how, where, and for whom AI services have been produced are valuable secrets, which vendors strategically disclose to clients depending on commercial interests. This article provides a critical analysis of how AIaaS vendors manipulate the visibility of human labour in AI production based on whether the vendor relies on paid or unpaid labour to fill interstitial gaps. Where vendors are able to occlude human labour in the organisational ‘backstage,’ such as in data preparation, validation or impersonation, they do so regularly, further contributing to ongoing techno-utopian narratives of AI hype. Yet, when vendors must co-produce the AI service with the client, such as through localised AI training, they must ‘lift the curtain’, resulting in a paradoxical situation of needing to both perpetuate dominant AI hype narratives while emphasising AI’s mundane limitations.

人工智能即服务（AIaaS）使个人和组织能够以定制或“现成”的形式按需访问AI。但是，开发，培训和部署之间的机构隔离可能导致严重的不透明情况，例如使生产和培训AI服务所需的人工水平变得模糊。有关如何，在何处以及为谁生产AI服务的信息是宝贵的秘密，供应商将根据商业利益从战略上向客户披露这些信息。本文根据AIaaS供应商是依靠有偿还是无偿劳动来填补填隙空缺，对AIaaS供应商如何操纵人工劳动在AI生产中的可视性进行了批判性分析。供应商能够在组织的“后台”（例如数据准备）中遮盖人力，验证或假冒，他们会定期这样做，从而进一步促进了AI炒作的技术乌托邦式叙事。但是，当供应商必须与客户共同生产AI服务时（例如通过本地化AI培训），他们必须“拉开帷幕”，这导致了一个矛盾的局面，即既要使主导性AI宣传大行其道，又要强调AI的平凡局限性。