You’ve Been Training Google’s AI For 15 Years Without Even Knowing It, Totalling $9 Billion In Free Labor
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I say ‘without you knowing’, but everyone knows the CAPTCHA is training bots, right? Clicking on lamp posts and road signs was never random, we all knew that, right?
No? Ok, well then this will blow your socks off.
This story comes from an article on X by @sharbel.
You’ve almost definitely done a CATPCHA, but did you know it’s maybe the most contrived acronym to ever be invented? The letters stand for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
Clunky name, but accurate. These simple tests were developed in the late ‘90s/early’00s to parse out bots flooding the internet with garbage from the real people flooding the internet with garbage.
Originally it was random warped letters that bots (and regular people tbf) were bad at reading. But then Luis von Ahn, a professor from Carnegie Mellon had a bright idea, if people are doing all this work anyway, why not put it to good use?
In 2007, reCAPTCHA added a word from a scanned book that the computer couldn’t decipher and though you didn’t know it, you were helping digitise 130 million books.
After Google bought the tech in 2009, the test shifted in 2012 to traffic lights and lamp posts. Most people cottoned on to the trick, but yes, for 15 years we were all helping catalogue Google’s raw streetview data.
At it’s peak around 200 million reCAPTCHAs were being solved every single day, coming out to 2 billion seconds, or 500,000 hours of labor a day. That’s around $5 million in free labor every day for fifteen years. Add that up and Google has stolen $9 billion from you personally.
You should invoice them.
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