Crowdsourcing can be a useful way for training AI and deep learning models by harnessing the collective intelligence and abilities of a large group of people. The general idea is to outsource tasks that would otherwise be performed by a small group of experts to a large group of non-experts. This can include tasks such as annotating data, collecting data, and labeling images. The benefits of crowdsourcing for AI training include increased efficiency, reduced costs, and improved accuracy and diversity of the training data. However, there are also challenges associated with crowdsourcing, such as quality control, data privacy, and security.
Undoubted benefits of crowdsourcing to train AI
One of the most common uses of crowdsourcing in AI training is to annotate large amounts of data. For example, image classification models require large amounts of labeled data, which can be difficult to obtain through traditional methods. Crowdsourcing can be used to annotate the images quickly and at a lower cost.
Another key use of crowdsourcing in AI training is to collect data from a large number of sources. For example, natural language processing models require large amounts of text data to train on. Crowdsourcing can be used to collect this data from a variety of sources, including online forums, social media, and other online platforms.
Crowdsourcing can also provide increased diversity in the training data, which can lead to more accurate and robust models. For example, if the data used to train an image classification model is primarily collected and annotated by people from a single geographic region, the model may not perform as well in other regions. Crowdsourcing can help to address this by collecting data from a more diverse group of annotators.
Factors to keep in mind
One of the challenges of crowdsourcing is ensuring the quality of the data being collected and annotated. To address this, crowdsourcing platforms often implement quality control measures, such as having multiple annotators label the same data and using a majority vote to determine the final label.
Privacy and security are also important considerations when using crowdsourcing to train AI models. Crowdsourced data may contain sensitive information, and it’s important to ensure that this data is protected and used in accordance with privacy laws and regulations.
Some recent examples
Microsoft’s Bing Image Retrieval Team used crowdsourcing to annotate large amounts of images in order to train their image classification models. The data was annotated by thousands of workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform.
Google’s Natural Language Processing team used crowdsourcing to annotate large amounts of text data in order to train their language models. The data was annotated by thousands of workers on a proprietary platform developed by Google.
Stanford University’s AI Lab used crowdsourcing to train a machine learning model to identify depression in social media posts. The data was annotated by a large group of annotators from the university and from the general public.
Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab used crowdsourcing to train a machine learning model to recognize and respond to emotional cues in text-based conversations. The data was annotated by a large group of annotators from the university and from the general public.
These are just a few examples of the many AI training projects that have leveraged crowdsourcing in recent years. The use of crowdsourcing in AI training is an active area of research and development, and new applications are being developed all the time.