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Comment by ageitgey | Hacker News Reader

Google is literally using you as unpaid labor to label/validate their image datasets.

My guess is that either (1) your first attempt at validation didn't match what their automated system identified so it didn't have high enough confidence to proceed or (2) the first image is one you are classifying from scratch but the second/third image is the one that you are only validating against their guess.

In either case, it's amazing to me that Google is able to get the whole world to do unpaid menial work for them by offering a free product to website owners.

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The "identify the grid squares which contain a sign" type CAPTCHA isn't clear about whether you should be selecting all grid squares that contain mostly sign, or all grid squares that contain ANY of the sign. I imagine that particular one causes a fair discrepancy in what people select.

In fact I want to know what other people choose to do for those one. I'd like to guess that Hacker News types would disproportionately choose the latter option.

Yeah I do any of the sign.

Interesting, my assumption has been that it must reside mostly or entirely in the square. Now I'm wondering are the instruction intentionally vague?

I think they shift selection grid from user to user, so they get a statistical outcome with a great precision of where the sign really is. If some data points stand out, they should be simply ignored.

A million times this.

- Do the posts or supports of the signs count as part of the signs?

- What if it's a sign but not a street sign?

- If the camera is looking across a road, but the pavement isn't visible, does that image contain a road? I suspect humans are answering that differently, but it's not as bad as the sign one.

- Storefronts. Sometimes I can't tell what I'm looking at. There's a building with lettering on it, but I can't tell whether it's a store much less a storefront.

Google needs to add a tutorial for humans on how to answer those captchas, because there's not enough context for us to figure out what google really wants.

If they'd dogfood this and require their employees to solve a captcha to login to their workstations, this problem would have been solved yesterday.

it's amazing to me that Google is able to get the whole world to do unpaid menial work for them by offering a free product to website owners.

I'm surprised, since google bought youtube in 2006, that google doesn't let people add translation subtitles to videos on youtube, which is something people have historically been actively willing to do for free, compare multiple submissions against each other to gauge accuracy, then map that to the audio of the video to train and machine based language translation datasets. Always seemed like a killer way to leverage what people would do for free to advance the state of the art.

Ha, I believe Duolingo is doing the same - getting their users to translate huge bodies of text while learning new languages

The creator of Duolingo was also the creator of ReCaptcha I think. He has a really interesting ted talk about it here: https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_...

>In either case, it's amazing to me that Google is able to get the whole world to do unpaid menial work for them by offering a free product to website owners.

Its an example of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble....

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