Exch w/ Turkers
In partnership with aarea and Group of Artificial Intelligence and Art (GAIA, C4AI, Inova USP), Exch w/ Turkers is a net art piece that brings to light the role played by humans in running Artificial Intelligence (AI), as well as their working conditions.
Though frequently labeled as automatic and autonomous, AIs depend on work done by humans. In the website chat windows, participants were invited to chat with the human microworkers (Turkers) responsible for doing the many small tasks necessary for, e.g., developing and verifying AI data sets.
The project was on show at the virtual gallery www.aarea.co from March 13 to 27 2020, period in which users could freely ask questions and talk with the Turkers. After that date, a static version of the piece was transferred to exchanges.withturkers.net, where the conversations can still be read. We’re now working on an edited version of these conversations, which will be published soon.
The “Exch w/ Turkers” project was conceived and developed by Bruno Moreschi, Bernardo Fontes, Guilherme Falcão and Gabriel Pereira. An important part of the website’s programming was carried out by Luciano Ratamero, who we thank immensely for the commitment. We also wish to thank aarea’s technology and infrastructure consultant, Adriano Ferrari.
This project was supported by the Center for Arts, Design, & Social Research; Pedro Barbosa; and the Research and Collaboration Awards of the Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power - Sawyer Seminar, Cambridge University.