2023-05-01 15:44:07
They are the brave soldiers of an invisible and precarious army. If artificial intelligences can learn words, recognize images, aggregate ideas, juggle with concepts, it is because, in the shadows, thousands of workers around the world feed the beast, via what the are referred to as “microtasks”. “They consist, for example, in preparing and operating the algorithms that feed the artificial intelligences”describes Antonio Casilli, professor of sociology at the Polytechnic Institute of Paris.
Concretely, the click worker will “transcribe texts by correcting them if he sees errors, classify images by labeling them, so as to indicate which animal, object or person they represent, read a sentence and quickly say whether this sentence is in English or in German »lists the researcher. “He can still check what a virtual assistant like Siri (implemented by Apple) or Alexa (Amazon) has already recorded and check whether he correctly understands the language of human beings. »
The quality of the data, and therefore the accuracy of the response provided, depends on an appropriate annotation. To identify a person in a photo, the click worker will have to annotate several shots, but captured from different angles or lights, with various facial expressions. Currently, “a whole lot of work is being done to restore greater diversity in the corpus of data”explains Étienne Mineur, designer and publisher, specialist in AI. “In the West, where the vast majority of images are those of white men or women, the algorithms are now fed with Asian, African-American faces, in order to balance the perception of the world of these machines. »
Microworkers work both in the countries of the North and in those of the South, but with different profiles: in the North, the click worker may already have a job, but expect additional income. In the South, the “little hands” are generally younger, outside the employment circuit and paid “less than a dollar an hour (0.91 €, Editor’s note), points Antonio Casilli. Or, “the more AI there is to ‘train’, the more people you will need to update them”, analyzes the sociologist. So many new opportunities to precarious.
In addition, any Internet user who has already had to validate a “captcha”, these images (red lights, pedestrian crossings, etc.) that must be ticked to prove that one is not a robot, has also contributed to an AI. And that without going to the other end of the earth.
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