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Friday, December 11, 2020

Mechanical Turk and AI: Invisible Workers

We used Mechanical Turk for a number of small projects, especially for getting initial data that was reasonable for first order testing.  Never for later predictive analysis.   Our look at it was that they were reasonably paid.    Had not seen much about MT lately, but based on this is still in considerable use.

AI needs to face up to its invisible-worker problem

Machine-learning models are trained by low-paid online gig workers. They’re not going away—but we can change the way they work, says Saiph Savage.  In Technology Review

SAIPH SAVAGE

Many of the most successful and widely used machine-learning models are trained with the help of thousands of low-paid gig workers. Millions of people around the world earn money on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, which allow companies and researchers to outsource small tasks to online crowdworkers. According to one estimate, more than a million people in the US alone earn money each month by doing work on these platforms. Around 250,000 of them earn at least three-quarters of their income this way. But even though many work for some of the richest AI labs in the world, they are paid below minimum wage and given no opportunities to develop their skills. 

Saiph Savage is the director of the human-computer interaction lab at West Virginia University, where she works on civic technology, focusing on issues such as fighting disinformation and helping gig workers improve their working conditions. This week she gave an invited talk at NeurIPS, one of the world’s biggest AI conferences, titled “A future of work for the invisible workers in AI.” I talked to Savage on Zoom the day before she gave her talk.   ... " 

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