{"id":13550,"date":"2023-07-02T20:04:15","date_gmt":"2023-07-03T00:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13550"},"modified":"2023-07-15T17:40:52","modified_gmt":"2023-07-15T21:40:52","slug":"a-mathematics-ai-factory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13550","title":{"rendered":"A Mathematics AI Factory?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few days ago I read a fascinating article in New York magazine: Inside the AI Factory<\/a>, which explained how the very large business of hiring humans to do tasks that generate training data for AI works. One reaction I had to this was “at least this means math is safe from AI, nobody is going to pay mathematicians to generate this sort of training data.” Yesterday though I ran across this tweet from Kevin Buzzard<\/a>, which advertises work (see this link<\/a>) that seems to be of this kind.<\/p>\n

A company called Prolific<\/a> is advertising work paying 20-25 pounds\/hour doing tasks in Lean 3. This company is in exactly the business described in the NY mag articles, hiring people to do tasks as part of “studies”, which often are generating AI training data.<\/p>\n

One unusual thing about this whole industry is that if you sign up for this work you often have no idea who your employer really is, or what your work will be used for, and you sign a non-disclosure agreement to not discuss what you do. In this case, a few things can be gleaned from discussions on the Lean Zulip server<\/a>:<\/p>\n