Work

Crowd-Sourcing or AI-Sourcing? The Impact of GenAI on Data Annotation Tasks

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Generative AI (GenAI) and its capabilities have led people of various professions to consider how expendable their jobs are. Meanwhile, others see an opportunity to maximize productivity, using GenAI to reduce their time and effort. Crowd workers are no exception; experimental evidence and workers’ testimonies concur that GenAI tools, especially ChatGPT, are being used in the completion of tasks. With this in mind, one is left to wonder if this is the end of “true” human annotations, and if so, if it even matters. We predict that the future of data annotation will be characterized by a spectrum of human-AI collaboration modes, ranging from tasks performed only by GenAI, to those requiring human-AI collaboration, to those that will be more efficient if they remain human-driven.We also foresee that a potential negative effect of the uncritical adoption of GenAI for annotation, will be the decreased diversity in resulting labels, which may not represent the views of all.

Source: Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14904342

Authors: Christoforou, Evgenia, Demartini, Gianluca, Otterbacher, Jahna

Institutions: The University of Queensland, Open University of Cyprus

Language: English

Topic: Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing

Subfield: Computer Science Applications

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: European Commission, Research and Innovation Foundation, Australian Research Council

Awards: G4229002942, ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience, Research Center on Interactive Media, Smart System and Emerging Technologies