Sorry If I Broke Your Brain: Notes from a Data Annotator

Sorry If I Broke Your Brain”: An Annotator’s Notes I do data annotation—and for a living. No gig. I observe grippers and zippers. Wonder about feasibility, when one starts an action or ends it. Do you think about how complex it might be to decide when an action starts—for example, waking up and preparing your bag? How many milliseconds are embedded in three minutes? Three minutes in the life of any human being is complex. Huge. Big time. Believe me, annotators know. I do observe images and tell why they look artificial, and it’s not a matter of seeing six fingers instead of five. It’s a matter of knowing how people look into the camera or anything. The way you order coffee is a complex operation. Believe me, annotators know. I also jailbreak at times, trying to make a model produce unsafe content. We need to check how harmful it can be, so we study the kinds of harm that are out there. There are many types; some of them it would be better never to learn about. But an annotator learns…