HUMAN-IN-THE-LOOP_05065

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Human-in-the-loop is part of I’m not a robot — a series of applications exploring the murky world of digital labour and human intelligence tasks. A captcha seems like a harmless annoyance to a user, but it’s a powerful and lucrative method of extracting free labour as we’ve collectively been training AI for free by solving Google’s reCAPTCHA puzzles for decades. To date, it’s estimated that Google has extracted $7.3 billion worth of free labour using this method. Machine learning is nothing on its own: it requires millions of hours of human work to train an algorithm before its “intelligence” is realised. For AI to identify something as a car, it first needs humans to identify thousands of car images. The humans behind this process are known as “crowdworkers” performing “microtasks” or “microwork”. Half of these online platform workers are earning less than $2 per hour, yet these micro actions have huge benefits for tech companies. Data labelling is the fuel that powers machine learning. Desbiens-Desmeules was inspired to mess with this process and generate images that are impossible to identify, even for humans. The artist fed thousands of images of cats to an AI model specialised in identifying cars. This tongue-in-cheek experiment resulted in absurd looking creatures that are neither cat nor car, yet somehow both at once. Desbiens-Desmeules then created a simulation of the Captcha challenge that asks users to identify either cats or cars, over and over and over… Regardless of the selections made, the application will continue to ask for more. The viewer is encouraged to click and click, offering an ever increasing amount of precious intelligence training for free.