4.8 • 861 Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
It takes seconds for an A.I. chatbot to give you an answer – but many manhours went into getting you there. Varsha Bansal, tech reporter for The Guardian, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the grueling work of training A.I. to give answers that are fact checked and meet safety guidelines, and why, when it seems our future is digital, humans are still very much needed behind the scenes. Her article is “How thousands of overworked underpaid humans train Google’s AI to seem smart.”
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| 0:48.1 | I'm pretty sure the day is coming when we take artificial intelligence completely for granted. |
| 0:58.1 | But for now, as chatbots gain the ability to respond to ever more complicated requests |
| 1:03.6 | and deliver what we actually want, it can still feel pretty magical. |
| 1:08.4 | But if the algorithms that enable AI come across like so much wizardry, |
| 1:12.7 | we shouldn't be surprised to discover that none of it would be possible without a man or a woman |
| 1:17.6 | behind the curtain. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd. Of course, we know |
| 1:24.1 | human computer scientists set up these technologies to learn for themselves |
| 1:27.9 | from the vast ocean of information on the internet. |
| 1:31.3 | But those silicon brains still crank out a fair amount of nonsense along with spot-on |
| 1:36.4 | correct answers. |
| 1:37.6 | And the effort to improve their output still requires a large army of largely invisible, fully |
| 1:43.0 | biological minds. |
| 1:45.3 | Journalist Varsha Buncel writes about the intersection of technology, AI, and humans. |
| 1:50.1 | Her article for The Guardian is headlined how thousands of overworked underpaid humans train |
| 1:55.3 | Google's AI to seem smart. |
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