"There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo... Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company."

Star@sopuli.xyz to Technology@lemmy.world – 1130 points –
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Google has a volunteer program to make their AI better. Fucking one of the biggest corporations in the world asking for free labor and apparently people do it?

You were/are doing it every time you solved a Captcha to prove you aren't a robot.

Google banned 4chan from using recaptcha at the time because everyone was just typing swear words in place of the scanned word that Google couldn't OCR

Where did you hear about that? It sounds odd, because surely Google could've filtered out the swearwords, and at the end of the day users still had to solve the captcha correctly sooner or later if they wanted to post.

The old two word captchas were one word that Google knows in order to test if you're human, and one word scanned from Google's book scanning program that their algorithms failed to properly OCR, meaning for the second word you could type in whatever you wanted and you would pass the captcha

Sites were allowed to use recaptcha for free because their users were actually doing work training neural nets to read books better, if a large percentage of their users are saying every unknown scan is the n-word, I could see why Google wouldn't want them having access to it

Yeah but this is in the area of unpaid labor. You "had to" solve a captcha in order they let you use another service. You are not visiting a page with the sole purpose of voluntarily solving captchas