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Netflix’s ‘The Circle’ Gets One Key Thing Right About A.I.
Behind every A.I. lurks human labor
Netflix’s The Circle largely imagines a world that already exists, where people sit in their rooms and judge each other on social media.
But part of the show’s novelty comes in the form of an app called the Circle, a “voice-activated” social media platform displayed on TVs around contestants’ hotel rooms. The contestants speak to the Circle to pick their profile pictures, rank each other, and pretty much everything else. As for the inner workings of the app, “voice-activated” is pretty much all they know.
Making the social media platform voice-activated serves two purposes — it’s better TV for someone to talk then scroll with a touchscreen, and it’s undoubtedly more futuristic. But as The Circle creator Tim Harcourt told Vulture, the app is mostly a facade. Indeed, the app is more human-powered than the show lets on.
“When you talk to the Circle, there’s a producer who’s transcribing what you say. Instantly, that gets pushed to the next room. So there is some humanity in the app, and that’s a couple of producers whose job it is to take dictation from the players,” he said.
At first blush, that seems wrong — rather than an omnipresent app, there’s actually a person behind the curtain. But modern virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana were all built this way, with technology companies paying people to transcribe what people ask or command. The Circle might actually be a good model for understanding how these tech companies train their own A.I. assistants.
“When you talk to the Circle, there’s a producer who’s transcribing what you say. Instantly, that gets pushed to the next room.”
Sure, Siri and Alexa are leagues beyond the fake A.I. at the heart of The Circle. When you ask Siri for the Giants score (spoiler alert, they’re always losing), there isn’t always someone transcribing your question. But in many cases, these recordings are stored, and sometimes transcribed, by human beings. The goal in transcribing these mundane requests is giving the speech recognition algorithms that power Siri or Alexa or…
