How YouTube Uses Mechanical Turk Tasks to Help Train Its AI

It's no secret that YouTube has struggled to moderate the videos on its platform over the past year. The company has faced repeated scandals over its inability to rid itself of inappropriate and disturbing content, including some videos aimed at children. Often missing from the discussion over YouTube's shortcomings, though, are the employees directly tasked with removing things like porn and graphic violence, as well as the contractors that help train AI to learn to detect unwelcome uploads. But a Mechanical Turk task shared with WIRED appears to provide a glimpse into what training one of YouTube's machine learning tools looks like at the ground level. MTurk is an Amazon-owned marketplace where corporations and academic researchers pay individual contractors to perform micro-sized services--called Human Intelligence Tasks--in exchange for a small sum, usually less than a dollar.