Page 24 - ARUBA TODAY

A24 TECHNOLOGY
Tuesday 6 March 2018
AI has a dirty little secret: It's powered by people

By RYAN NAKASHIMA
AP Technology Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) —
There's a dirty little secret
about artificial intelligence:
It's powered by hundreds of
thousands of real people.
From makeup artists in Ven-
ezuela to women in conser-
vative parts of India, peo-
ple around the world are
doing the digital equivalent
of needlework —drawing
boxes around cars in street
photos, tagging images,
and transcribing snatches
of speech that computers
can't quite make out.
Such data feeds directly This undated combo of images provided by CrowdFlower shows before and after renderings from CrowdFlower’s Human-in-the-
into "machine learning" Loop technology, which provides sophisticated tools that enable a person to label and structure every part of a normal photo and
algorithms that help self- convert it into structured "training data” that an AI system can understand and interpret.
driving cars wind through Associated Press
traffic and let Alexa figure
out that you want the lights are developing software tem to play a game, we're Aria Khrisna, a 36-year-old phone, one of a roomful
on. Many such technolo- that makes it easier to la- building a system to save father of three in Tegal, of headphone-wearing
gies wouldn't work without bel photos and other data, lives," says Mighty AI CEO Indonesia, says that add- "intent analysts" transcribes
massive quantities of this even on smartphones. Daryn Nakhuda. ing word tags to clothing everything from misheard
human-labeled data. Venture capitalist S. "Soma" ___ pictures on websites such numbers to profanity and
These repetitive tasks pay Somasegar says he sees Marjorie Aguilar, a 31-year- as eBay and Amazon pays quickly directs the comput-
pennies apiece. But in bulk, "billions of dollars of op- old freelance makeup art- him about $100 a month, er how to respond.
this work can offer a de- portunity" in servicing the ist in Maracaibo, Venezue- roughly half his income. That information feeds
cent wage in many parts of needs of machine learning la, spends four to six hours a And for 25-year-old Sha- back into the system. "Next
the world — even in the U.S. algorithms. His firm, Madro- day drawing boxes around mima Khatoon, her job an- time through, we've got
And it underpins a technol- na Venture Group, invest- traffic objects to help train notating cars, lane markers a better chance of being
ogy that could change hu- ed in Mighty AI. Humans will self-driving systems for and traffic lights at an all- successful," says Robert
manity forever: AI that will be in the loop "for a long, Mighty AI. female outpost of data- Nagle, Interactions' chief
drive us around, execute long, long time to come," She earns about 50 cents labeling company iMerit in technology officer.
verbal commands without he says. an hour, but in a crisis- Metiabruz, India, represents ___
flaw, and — possibly — one Accurate labeling could wracked country with run- the only chance she has Researchers have tried to
day think on its own. make the difference be- away inflation, just a few to work outside the home find workarounds to hu-
For more than a decade, tween a self-driving car hours' work can pay a in her conservative Muslim man-labeled data, often
Google has used people distinguishing between the month's rent in bolivars. community. without success.
to rate the accuracy of its sky and the side of a truck "It doesn't sound like a lot of "It's a good platform to in- In a project that used
search results. More recent- — a distinction Tesla's Mod- money, but for me it's pretty crease your skills and sup- Google Street View images
ly, investors have poured el S failed in the first known decent," she says. "You can port your family," she says. of parked cars to estimate
tens of millions of dollars fatality involving self-driving imagine how important it is The benefits of greater ac- the demographic makeup
into startups like Mighty AI systems in 2016. for me getting paid in U.S. curacy can be immediate. of neighborhoods, then-
and CrowdFlower, which "We're not building a sys- dollars." At InterContinental Hotels Stanford researcher Timnit
Group, every call that its Gebru tried to train her AI
digital assistant Amelia can by scraping Craigslist pho-
take from a human saves tos of cars for sale that were
$5 to $10, says information labeled by their owners.
technology director Scot But the product shots didn't
Whigham. look anything like the car
When Amelia fails, the pro- images in Street View, and
gram listens while a call is the program couldn't rec-
rerouted to one of about ognize them. In the end,
60 service desk workers. It she says, she spent $35,000
learns from their response to hire auto dealer experts
and tries the technique out to label her data.
on the next call, freeing up Trevor Darrell, a machine
human employees to do learning expert at the Uni-
other things. versity of California Berke-
When a computer can't ley, says he expects it will
make out a customer call be five to 10 years before
to the Hyatt Hotels chain, computer algorithms can
an audio snippet is sent to learn to perform without
AI-powered call center In- the need for human label-
teractions in an old brick ing. His group alone spends
building in Franklin, Mas- hundreds of thousands of
sachusetts. There, while dollars a year paying peo-
the customer waits on the ple to annotate images.q