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Crowdsource by Google

crowdsource.google.com

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Re: Crowdsource by Google

#51
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, you can't get child labor on MTurk (officially). But hey, you get badges, and you help the community by providing them training data they'll lock up in a server and use to monopolize more sectors of the economy. Everyone wins when google can do better sentiment analysis on your non-english emails.

Quoted post unavailable.

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Re: Crowdsource by Google

#52
post #27

Quoted post unavailable.

It isn't slavery when there's people willing to do free work for Google (as perverse as it may sound). Just look at their product forums.

Responding to parent comment:

  People want free stuff and then complain if some entity asks help.

  How's seeking unpaid help digital slavery? You must be very charitable person.

  And FYI here are some definitions from dictionary, in case you meant something else by "digital slavery" 
slavery : the state of being a slave. slave : a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.

Re: Crowdsource by Google

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want raw, unmoderated user generated content?

Yes! They can provide both filtered & unfiltered data.

I imagine there would be some serious legal concerns with releasing the raw data (I work for Google, but no special insights into this project)

Re: Crowdsource by Google

#54
post #29

Crowdsource by Google aka "Help a billion dollar company to create datasets for free"

We are already providing search clicks and video likes as indicators of content quality. They train AIs on our preferences.

It's not working so well though, in my experience anyway

Re: Crowdsource by Google

#55
post #41

I guess mechanical Turk was too expensive for Google. I’m all for collaborative, open source projects but it seems kind of skeevy for a company as profitable as Google to basically set up free labor for themselves. I hope there are some fun 4chan stories of people breaking classification.

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Re: Crowdsource by Google

#57

They should avoid using the word community, if side product of these contributions are going to empower their sales. I had been contributing to Google Maps for more than 8 years now, but in return all i get is stars and maximum an invite to a meetup. But, when i saw the other side of Google Maps with respect to consuming it through API usage point of view, the prices are not affordable in long term. Also, there is a…

you're getting the use of the service..... for free...Yeesh! Consider before Google Maps. You'd either (a) buy a local map every few years (b) pay for a car navigation system. Now Google comes along and offers you a free maps and navigation service and you're complaining that if you try to make it better you're being screwed over? IT'S FREE!

Yes, it's free and good. Im not complaining about the Google Maps as a product, but i'm complaining about the system built around Google Maps. 1. I don't know how many contributors of Google Maps know the API side of the story. If they knew that will they be ready to contribute for free? 2. Though Google might have touched about selling user data in Terms & Conditions, the Terms & Conditions themselves are big trap worded with complex sentences having many pages. Yes, i may be lazy/dumb not to go through pages of T&C, and i accept that part of my mistake. 3. For a Google Maps contributor, when they contribute apart from giving them the points and appreciation, Google never tells them their contributed data is going to be sold in the form of API (in a visible manner). Whereas in YouTube the contributors do know, they may get compensated upon N number of views.

In overall the point is similar to everyone's complaint on Google, "User data is being used to their favour" but my expectation is for Google to openly and visibly tell that so all the competitors have level playing ground.

Re: Crowdsource by Google

#58
I was always a huge fan of Google from the late 90s onwards and was employed their from 2011 to 2013. I continue to use their services to this day. Unfortunately no matter how much you like something, when any one entity amasses this much power it's bound to make you a bit uncomfortable. I wish Google did more to anonymize and potentially distribute this kind of tech in a way that enabled anyone to run it. At the scale that Google is it's really hard to trust them with more and more personal data considering the employees could be quite literally anyone with any personal agenda that does not serve the greater good. They have no way of vetting employees to that degree and that's the biggest issue. I'm not just handing my data over to a machine or some homogeneous blob. I'm handing it to people I don't even know.

Ultimately crowdsource leads to UBI powered by Google. It's inevitable. But one entity controlling our lives is very hard to accept even if it is Google.

Re: Crowdsource by Google

#59
One of the tasks in this app is audio validation:

> Audio validation: Listen to a short audio clip and determine if the pronunciation sounds natural in your language.

If this is something you're interested in doing, I recommend contributing to Mozilla's Common Voice instead. Common Voice builds freely licensed (CC-0) voice datasets that can be used by anyone, not just Google:

https://commonvoice.mozilla.org

Re: Crowdsource by Google

#60

I was expecting to be pessimistic, but Google actually releases the datasets under a permissive license (CC-By 4.0). Awesome! https://research.google/tools/datasets/open-images-extended-... https://github.com/google-research-datasets/hiertext

It's nice that Google is releasing something, but the 3 datasets (https://crowdsource.google.com/about/open-source/) only cover only a fraction of the Crowdsource tasks:

  Food compare: Compare the characteristics of two food images.
  Response rating: Evaluate the natural-ness of a bot response.
  Audio donation: Record your voice to improve speech technology.
  Food facts: Tell us if a food dish has particular characteristics.
  Food labeller: Tell us what food an image contains.
  Semantic similarity: Judge whether two phrases have the same meaning.
  Chart understanding: Judge whether charts are understandable and trustworthy.
  Glide type: Glide your fingers on the keyboard to type the text that you see.
  Audio validation: Listen to a short audio clip and determine if the pronunciation sounds natural in your language.
  Image label verification: Tell us if images are tagged correctly.
  Image capture: Collect and share photos of your part of the world.
  Translation: Translate phrases and words into different languages.
  Translation validation: Select which phrases are translated correctly.
  Handwriting recognition: Look at handwriting and type the text that you see.
  Sentiment evaluation: Decide if a sentence in your language is positive, negative or neutral.
  Smart camera (Android Lollipop 5.0+ required): Point at an object and see if the camera can guess what it is.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Even in those 3 datasets, Google does not disclose the proportion/percentage of the crowdsourced contributions that are released publicly. I would not contribute to Crowdsource with the expectation that my contributions would help build a freely licensed dataset.

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