May 4
Ghost Work: The Labor that Powers AI
Siddharth Suri, Computational Social Scientist at Microsoft will give this talk which is part of the Humanities and Technology Lecture Series.
Think about the last time you searched for something on the web. Ever wonder who trained the search engine ranking algorithm? Ghost work is the hidden human labor that powers modern AI systems not only for web search, but also for content moderation, image recognition, spam detection, and a host of other problem domains. This talk will shed light on this hidden workforce by introducing the humans that train modern AI systems and step in when these systems have low confidence. Through the combination of qualitative and quantitative research I’ll show how workers self-organize by building their own collaboration network. I’ll also show how workers constantly have to hustle to find good work and that those creating the work have the majority of the power in these markets. I’ll close by discussing the implications of ghost work on the overall future of work. Most of the research in this talk is from the recently published book, Ghost Work, with Mary L. Gray.
from Humanities Center