I was always a huge fan of Google from the late 90s onwards and was employed their from 2011 to 2013. I continue to use their services to this day. Unfortunately no matter how much you like something, when any one entity amasses this much power it's bound to make you a bit uncomfortable. I wish Google did more to anonymize and potentially distribute this kind of tech in a way that enabled anyone to run it. At the scale that Google is it's really hard to trust them with more and more personal data considering the employees could be quite literally anyone with any personal agenda that does not serve the greater good. They have no way of vetting employees to that degree and that's the biggest issue. I'm not just handing my data over to a machine or some homogeneous blob. I'm handing it to people I don't even know.

Ultimately crowdsource leads to UBI powered by Google. It's inevitable. But one entity controlling our lives is very hard to accept even if it is Google.

Handover your most sensitive information and get “cool badges” in return. Sign me up!

Maybe they are after more diverse answers than could be provided by their own employees. Meaning they don't hire diverse enough.

I may be coming too cynical on this. So folks are supposed to add value for google for free. And Google can get away by gamification tricks?

Does anyone else hate what corporations have done to the word "delightful"? All the corporate art is so homogeneous too.

Also a trillion dollar plus market cap company trying to get free labor? Seriously?

This is kinda funny.

> "Connect with others around the world"

The only connecting I'd want to do is with Chinese people to practise my Chinese. Inwhich my horribly broken Chinese would be a detriment to the algorithm.

"People like you helping people like us help ourselves."

Basically, "How to make people to work for free 101." What is the value of those badges?

> As a member of our global community of contributors, you're helping to create AI that can best serve the rich

Ok

Scammy how they're spinning it with language used by non-profits/charity: "Learn why your help matters".

I suggest pairing this with another front-page HN article from today: https://thehustle.co/why-free-stuff-makes-us-irrational/ and in that article, s/us/Google/g.

We all need to contribute to save Google from the dangers of nonrecord profits

One of the tasks in this app is audio validation:

> Audio validation: Listen to a short audio clip and determine if the pronunciation sounds natural in your language.

If this is something you're interested in doing, I recommend contributing to Mozilla's Common Voice instead. Common Voice builds freely licensed (CC-0) voice datasets that can be used by anyone, not just Google:

https://commonvoice.mozilla.org

Wow, did they intentionally try to make the most loathsome thing possible?

How naive can people be? Help Google build AI? Google is very profitable business. They should pay whoever works for them.

I can do some free work for wikipedia, osm or the like. But not for Google.

So if Google services behave in a tone-deaf way regarding the culture and languages of non-western countries, now it's the fault of us the foreigners for not contributing enough to the AI?

The app was initially released 2016, with the last update half a year ago. Did anything happen to get this posted?

If not, maybe add a (2016).

How much do they pay?

I guess mechanical Turk was too expensive for Google. I’m all for collaborative, open source projects but it seems kind of skeevy for a company as profitable as Google to basically set up free labor for themselves.

I hope there are some fun 4chan stories of people breaking classification.

> Find Your Passion: Spotting food or animals in photos…

> Get Recognized: earn cool badges, level up on the leaderboards…

As far as I see this, Google want us to do the job...for free. No, thank you very much. Payment for this should be mandatory. Do not work for free for a humongous company.

You truly are the product.

Don’t feed the FAANG.

"work for us and don't get paid"

"But you can look at this image of a medal"

Is this essentially mechanical Turk, but without paying the laborers?

Is strange that they don't pay contributors for this at all. Google frequently pay me in Play store credit via Google Rewards to answer questions about places I've been and videos I've watched.

Because calling it "free labour" just wouldn't attract quite as many people...

Perhaps ~2 decades ago I would've been a bit more optimistic, but now that I'm aware of the authoritarian dystopia which Google and the rest of Big Tech are trying to drive society towards, I feel obliged to point out that helping it achieve that goal is a really bad idea.

Crowdsource by Google aka "Help a billion dollar company to create datasets for free"

I was expecting to be pessimistic, but Google actually releases the datasets under a permissive license (CC-By 4.0). Awesome!

https://research.google/tools/datasets/open-images-extended-...

https://github.com/google-research-datasets/hiertext

Now let's imagine it's fun enough so that people don't see it as free labor, but see it as genuine entertainment, like, say, Wordle.

How would they weed out bad-faith players who would try to teach the AI bad ideas, just for, well, fun of it?

I don't believe they might fail to anticipate that; I want to understand their approach.

From the authors of Google Reader, it-was-free-for-a-decade-but-now-pay-or you'll-lose-all-your-domain.com-emails-handled-by-previously-free-workspace-product, the secret agreement with Facebook for limiting competition in programatic advertising https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/google-faceboo... now arrives "Work for us for free in our proprietary product in exchange of a badge". What a big load of shit.

They should avoid using the word community, if side product of these contributions are going to empower their sales. I had been contributing to Google Maps for more than 8 years now, but in return all i get is stars and maximum an invite to a meetup. But, when i saw the other side of Google Maps with respect to consuming it through API usage point of view, the prices are not affordable in long term. Also, there is a clear monopolization of maps data, but the data is enriched by human volunteers who never get the share of API revenue. In this age of web3 all these crowdsourcing and community keywords from companies like Google will earn more backlash than a warm welcome.

If Google asked me to help with solving world hunger, I wouldn’t do it. Helped them enough with my data, and my lost faith in humanity when they were complicit in ruining the web.

So this helps improve Google’s proprietary products. But they aren’t willing to open source the data set?

So many comments bemoaning a company benefiting from the free labour of others. Wait until they hear about open source software, they'll do their nut!

Aren't they already doing this with reCAPTCHA?