You Can Earn Money Training AI With Data Annotation Tech
Whether we like it or not, and there a plenty of reasons to be in the ‘not’ category, Artificial Intelligence is now a major part of the way the world works.
It is all but impossible to buy a new smartphone without it having some form of AI offering, for example, whilst any major search engine will produce results from their own AI before you get to see the usual pages you’d expect to.
One of the big things that is happening now using Artificial Intelligence technology is data annotation.
The obvious question is, what on earth is it and how does it work? Is it something you can make use of too, or something you should avoid at all times?
Data Annotation Explained
Head on to one of the major social media platforms like Twitter or TikTok or look towards a message board such as Reddit and there is a good chance that you will see a video from someone telling you about how they are completing small tasks of data annotation.
In short, the more that companies decide to build Artificial Intelligence models, the more that they need to train them how to work. Such data annotation, which you might also see referred to as ‘data labelling’, sees people do tasks like coding or writing that technology companies can use to further develop their AI systems, which need huge data points to work.
Excited to share our work on STEERing robot behavior! With structured language annotation of offline data, STEER exposes fundamental manipulation skills that can be modulated and combined to enable zero-shot adaptation to new situations and tasks. pic.twitter.com/xnr7ggNPEK
— Laura Smith (@smithlaura1028) November 8, 2024
Some of the AI models carry out what is called ‘supervised learning’, which is where all of the input data has to be labelled by humans. Even those that work on ‘unsupervised learning’, which is becoming more common, still have a final step in which humans have to label the data.
Quite how many people work in the realms of data annotation isn’t clear, but it is almost certainly in the millions. Back in 2021, a study estimated that around 163 million had made profiles for online labour platforms, but that is likely to have grown exponentially since then. The more that the Artificial Intelligence industry grows, the more that data annotation is likely to alongside it.
How to Sign Up and Get Work
You might get excited at the idea of earning small amounts of money in your spare time courtesy of data annotation, but the reality is that it isn’t something that just anyone will be able to do.
In order to qualify for one of the programs on sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk or Remotasks you will first need to complete an assessment. The duration of that assessment can vary, with some sites asking you to give up several hours to complete it. The good news is that if you pass the assessment then you are likely to start receiving invitation to do paid work for the site, whilst if you are rejected then you likely won’t hear anything at all.
@bridget_onabudget Take this with a grain of salt because I haven’t officially been approved for Data Annotation yet, but I’ve spent hours scouring the internet, watching videos, and collecting the best tips and tricks and I wanted to share them all with you. Have you taken the assessment? What were your results?! #sidehustle #sidehustlesformoms #dataannotation #sahmsidehustle #sidehustlesforbeginners #sidehustleideas #savingmoney #budgeting ♬ Calm – Faneo sound
What the tasks are that you’re going to be asked to complete will also be quite different from one another. The trend in recent times has moved towards more highly-skilled data annotation work, which is largely because companies are asking for more and more complex AI models. The more specialised an AI model is, the more it will be able to be used in real-world scenarios that are also specialised.
The work can pay as much as £50 per hour or more, depending on what it is that you’re being asked to do and how good your own skillset is that the work is then making use of once you get settled down into doing it.
How is the Data Used?
One of the most crucial questions that many people are likely to ask is about how their dada is then used. Most of the bigger companies are likely to work in an extremely transparent manner, making clear from the off how it is that any data that you work on will be used. Some of the others, meanwhile, are much more opaque on the matter.
It isn’t out of the realms of the possible that you will be working on data for the likes of Meta, the owner of Facebook, OpenAI or even the United State Military. If that is the case, the likelihood of being told how the data that you’ve worked on is going to be used is extremely slim, to say the least.
For some, such moral implications will mean that the likelihood of them working in the realm of data annotation is a no-no. For others, they will happily accept that Artificial Intelligence is taking over whether we like it or not, so it makes sense to make a bit of money from it whilst they can.
In reality, data annotation work is actually being undervalued by the industry. Although the models are being called ‘Artificial Intelligence’, it is the collective human intelligence of those working on the data that is powering them. Not that those earning themselves some extra cash will mind all that much, provided they’re still being paid.