The Future of AI Depends on a Huge Workforce of Human Teachers

When Katharine Rubin has a spare moment on the way to school, she helps a big-name tech company smarten up its artificial intelligence. Rubin, a 22-year-old accounting major at New York City’s Baruch College, is part of a growing workforce that spends anywhere from 5 minutes to 40 hours a week increasing the I in AI. Specifically, Rubin and others provide training data for machine learning algorithms, a form of AI that can be taught from experience.

For an autonomous car to recognize pedestrians and stop signs, it’s typically fed thousands or millions of photos, all hand-labeled. To nail a conversation, a digital assistant needs to be told over and over when it’s failed. And so Rubin spends 10 to 30 hours a week on her phone or computer evaluating search results and chat retorts through a site called Clickworker. Her income, generally $10 to $14 an hour, pays for part of her college commute from New Jersey and some of her mom’s groceries. Each task pays 3¢ to 15¢ apiece, she says, and “they’re easy, so it quickly adds up.”