You've been training AI (Artificial Intelligence) for free.

Artificial intelligence as explained by Technopedia is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans.

A common example as found in the new line of smart devices (smartphones, TV, fridge) regardless of OS (Android, iOS ) is their speech recognition and task oriented systems (Google Assistant, Siri)

These systems are created to learn and evolve with time and understanding. But how is this achieved?

In order to achieve this, a system is fed large amounts of data, which it then uses to learn how to carry out a specific task . The term "Machine learning" coined out of this process.

AI learning

Creators of such systems have found an easy way of feeding their systems with the information they need without inputting them directly.
Big companies such as Google and Facebook have such AI systems that rely heavily on user generated input.

For Facebook, they've created an AI oriented Facial Recognition System which is able to learn the faces of end users directly from photos they upload on Facebook themselves. With time, this system is able to recognize faces of friends and family and tag them subsequently to photos when you upload them.

Google uses systems such as Captcha, where users are told to confirm they aren't robots by selecting pictures of cars or buildings. AI systems have to learn from somewhere, and in captcha it learns how cars, buildings, and other items look like. This is helping in training self-driving cars using google maps to navigate.

When Researchers at Google were trying to build a depth censoring camera, they went ever further, what they really need were a bunch of videos where mobile cameras explored static space from different angles, but where would they find that?

Google downloaded 2,000 Mannequin Challenge videos in 2016, fed them into an algorithm and a new kind of depth sensoring system was born. Every hour over 200,000 content is uploaded to YouTube, if you're training an AI, that's a lot of videos to draw on and they are no copyright restrictions on what you can use as training data. Same goes for websites. Everything is just there on the internet and it's free for the taking

Mannequin Challenge 2016

This has been a huge plus for the AI business, these systems need lots of examples to recognize even the most basic items, that use to mean years of data entry but now you can get everything of the internet in a matter of hours and for free.

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