'CrowdWorkers' Train the AI with Knowledge

The word is new to me, but understand the tasks involved.    And we used the idea, having people train AI type systems by allowing them to observe human behavior in context.    Usually just by observing, not by formally 'teaching' or 'teaching and correcting' the AI.  But just rote observation and putting the observation in a database.  Like Mechanical Turk, which we also used ... and Figure Eight, which adds complexity in creating and recording the observations.

'Crowdworking' provides the humans who train artificial intelligence  by Melissa Hellmann in Techxplore

Eager to make extra money on the side, Washington, D.C., resident Paula Alves Silva turned to a gig emblematic of the digital age: She recorded sentences read aloud in the comfort of her home to help train artificial intelligence (AI) software.

Silva completed the tasks in her native Portuguese tongue for Seattle-based startup DefinedCrowd, which develops machine learning algorithms that power products for businesses including heavyweights MasterCard and BMW. Such recordings could be used in voice recognition products introduced in new countries, or to train existing systems to recognize non-native speakers or regional accents, the company says.

Silva earned $20—from 8 to 33 cents per sentence—and considered that satisfactory given the short amount of time it took to complete the tasks. The knowledge that her task would contribute to a new artificial intelligence system was a bonus, she said.

When voice-activated software such as Amazon's Alexa responds to the simple command of calling Mom, thousands of global workers have helped train the software to ensure that, say, Tom from work isn't dialed instead. The workers transcribe and annotate recordings that are fed back into the software to improve Alexa's human speech recognition (sometimes using recordings from unaware consumers, according to Bloomberg).

The rise of AI in the age of the gig economy has ushered in an invisible workforce in which ordinary people, like Silva, train technology to be smarter.

Created in 2015 by CEO and founder Daniela Braga, DefinedCrowd is one of many companies that use so-called crowdworking to teach tech devices how to follow commands. Others including Amazon Mechanical Turk, and Figure Eight, formerly known as CrowdFlower, were established over a decade ago.  ... "