How Artificial Intelligence Learning is Provided by Humans

This excellent article about ‘Inside Amazon’s clickworker platform: How half a million people are being paid pennies to train AI‘ gives a great insight into the workings of human teaching Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the issues of crowdsourcing these tasks.

We have already mentioned in this blog how humans are core to improving the quality of a number of products we are using on a daily basis: ‘How humans intervene in Internet’s workings‘, ‘The best digital maps are created by humans and crowd-sourced’.

Now this has become quite more systematic and oriented towards teaching AI how to recognize certain patterns and things. It is quite a sad paradox that these tasks by humans are designed for machine learning and to replace in the very near future those same humans. In addition the opportunities they provide are quite limited and constraining on those who participate. Yet they do provide opportunities for people in developing countries to benefit from new technologies.