Incentive Design for Crowdsourced Development of Selective AI for Human and Machine Data Processing: A Case Study

The most typical approach today to data processing which does not have proven algorithms is to first request humans to provide labels to a small set of data and then develop artificial intelligences (AIs) with the data to perform all the remaining tasks. This development is sometimes crowdsourced through platforms such as Kaggle. The approach, however, is not always effective; if the AI does not meet the quality requirement, we may have to give up the development and all the data items have to be done manually. In order to avoid this all-or-nothing situation, “selective” AI programs that perform tasks which they are confident to do will be effective. This study addresses the problem of designing an incentive structure for crowdsourcing the development of such selective AI programs. This paper shows the results of our real-world experiment with a stair-step incentive structure and the behavior of a worker who developed the AI agent under the incentive. This paper also discusses the limitations of the proposed incentive design.