Talk:1897: Self Driving

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 15:36, 2 October 2017 by 162.158.155.32 (talk)
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I think this is more a reference to various projects (like the ReCAPTCHA that protects this site) that use CAPTCHAs to digitise text and so on, by involuntarily crowdsourcing the typing out of the text by users trying to complete a login, rather than specifically about bots trying to circumvent anti-bot protection. It also brings to mind things like the Zooniverse projects, where volunteers contribute to the classification of astronomical bodies, identification of animals in game reserves, and so on, in that a computer is able to make a rough guess as to what the image is, but it takes a human intervention to make a reliable (and therefore useful) identification. Similarly, Google's (now discontinued) Picasa software had a 'People' function where it would attempt to guess who the people in your photos were - yet it would make so many false identifications, and make you go through saying 'Yes/No' to each of them, that it often felt as though you might just as well have classified them all yourself in the first place.162.158.155.32 10:33, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

The comic clearly references techniques like reCAPTCHA that trick (1) unsuspecting people into doing the real work for free while they think they are solving a captcha, and (2) users of the final product who think it was created by an AI (or at least an OCR) when it was done "by hand". The comic is neither about teaching AIs, nor voluntary collaborative projects. Zetfr 11:42, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

I think the comic is about the borderlands between knowingly volunteering your time and unknowlingly supplying an AI with valuable information. When reading the caption my first thought was Google Translate, where the gamification / voluntary work is based on the texts submitted by a lot of unsuspecting users. When voluntarily contributing to the AI, I've been presented with some poor bloke's chat log, and another person's travel plans. 162.158.134.100 12:11, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

From what I have read, some image recognition AI projects use human input to refine their algorithms. Many AI algorithms also give probabilities of the correctness of the results. So in the domain of image recognition for self-driving cars it is conceivable that the computer would request human input to verify the interpretation of the scene. The comic is considering this possibility in a context that pokes fun at the field of AI in a rather scary real-world situation. Rtanenbaum (talk) 13:31, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

"From the creators of "Twitch Plays Pokemon" comes an all new reality series that'll blow you away! "Twitch Taxi!" Coming this Fall!" 162.158.62.153 13:38, 2 October 2017 (UTC)