Humans in the Loop

If you’ve used the internet any time in the last decade I am willing to bet of all my bitcoin* that you been asked to prove you are a true human by selecting every image that contains a traffic light, a bus, or a bicycle. It’s called a CAPTCHA: a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. That name alone should give you a clue as to what is going on. The very test designed to distinguish humans from machines is named after Alan Turing, the man who invented a test to determine if a machine could pass as human. The imitation game anyone?

In a somewhat ironic way, in CAPTCHAs, humans are the ones being tested.

“Instead of trying to produce a program to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s?”
— Alan Turing

We all fear a future in which machines might fool us into thinking they are people. But already, we are having to prove we are not one of them to a machine that seems to have trust issues. There is a pleasing irony here, if you like your ironies black and slightly dystopian, and with zebra crossings. Lots of them. Crosswalks to my American friends.

Here’s the sneaky part, these CAPTCHAs are not just digital gatekeepers. They are work orders dressed up as security. Each time you hold your breath and select that blurry traffic light, you are feeding valuable information to machine learning systems. Most often, these are used in training data for things like autonomous vehicles. Your Waymo is trained on you validating you are human before you get to book that nice restaurant for your anniversary dinner. The very things trying to be less reliant on us are, paradoxically, seemingly reliant on us to learn.

If you have ever wondered why it is always zebra crossings, traffic lights and road signs, that is not just coincidence. It is targeted data collection. You, me, and millions of others are acting as free quality assurance agents for billion-dollar AI systems. What is sold as a security mechanism is, in part, an elaborate crowdsourcing scheme. You could call it a clickwork con. And you are a free resource.

The economic value of this effort is hard to overstate. Google’s reCAPTCHA system alone has been estimated to involve hundreds of millions of human interactions daily. That’s just me trying to get gig tickets.

Imagine paying a human workforce to label that volume of data. Now imagine getting that work for free, by disguising it as a basic test. It is efficient. It is clever. It is exploitative. But, of course, it is also keeping the sites safe from bots galore which try to crack and do a bunch of not nice things on the websites we use.

Alas, no, you don’t get paid. Not a penny. You are the unpaid lackey in this system. You didn’t even apply for the job. This is what digital micro-labour looks like. Invisible, dispersed, and disguised as routine. While someone, somewhere, is building better AI with your intelligent clicks.

There is a bigger conversation to be had about who benefits from AI and who builds it. One I will get into lots on this site. We often talk about data privacy, but not enough about data labour. These moments of interaction – solving a CAPTCHA, clicking a checkbox – seem small. They are designed to feel insignificant. In aggregate, they shape how machines see the world. And it is a virtuous and almost symbiotic relationship. Humans augment the security of the sites humans use. It’s not all bad, is it?

Turing might raise an eyebrow at how his name is being used. He imagined a test of machine intelligence; we have built a test of human obedience. And we pass it daily, with ever-increasing efficiency. Well, maybe you do, buses get me everysingletime.

If there is a moral to this story, it is not just about surveillance or exploitation. It is about awareness. The next time you are asked to prove you are not a robot, consider asking a question: Who, exactly, is doing the work here?

You are not a robot. Maybe? That’s a a question for the philosophy sites. But maybe your are a helpful employee. One of billions.

James Stewart

*I have no bitcoin