The Intercept: Millions of gig economy workers around the world now earn a living on so-called crowd worker websites — work that falls under the umbrella of crowdsourcing, or dividing up tasks into minuscule portions to spread over a large number of people. The sites pay as little as $1 an hour for individuals to perform short, repetitive tasks, such as identifying images seen in pictures and churning out product reviews.

Some of these crowd workers were unknowingly helping to build out the Pentagon’s battlefield drone capability.

The work was done as part of a Defense Department initiative called Project Maven. Last year, The Intercept reported that the Pentagon had quietly tapped Google as part of the project to develop an artificial intelligence program to help Air Force analysts swiftly sort the thousands of hours of drone video and choose targets on the battlefield.

Outsourced crowd workers were tasked with providing the initial image data labeling — correctly identifying parts of an image — that allowed Google’s artificial intelligence program to tell buildings, images, trees, and other objects apart.

The artificial intelligence program, however, must learn to be able to distinguish between objects on the videos — and in order for the program to learn, someone must teach it. Enter the outsourced crowd workers, who were tasked with providing the initial image data labeling — correctly identifying parts of an image — that allowed Google’s artificial intelligence program to tell buildings, images, trees, and other objects apart.

read more at The Intercept