Around 2017, demand for microtasking crowdwork changed quickly and significantly, both in quantity and quality. Florian Alexander Schmidt tried to figure out, among other things, whether this was "a short-lived phenomenon or [something offering] long-term economic prospects for crowdworkers". This post is my own summary of the resulting report, titled "Crowdsourced Production of AI Training Data" and published in February 2019. What caused the sudden change in the demand for microtasking crowdwork was the equally sudden need of lots of high quality training data for autonomous vehicles. Those data are fed to the so-called self-learning algorithms that "drive" self-driving cars.

Just how artificial is Artificial Intelligence? Facebook created a PR firestorm last summer when reporters discovered a human "editorial team" – rather than just unbiased algorithms – selecting stories for its trending topics section. The revelation highlighted an elephant in the room of our tech world: companies selling the magical speed, omnipotence, and neutrality of artificial intelligence (AI) often can't make good on their promises without keeping people in the loop, often working invisibly in the background. So who are the people behind the AI curtain? Cut to Bangalore, India, and meet Kala, a middle-aged mother of two sitting in front of her computer in the makeshift home office that she shares with her husband.