> The process of generating this data is labor intensive, because it requires sound ID experts to listen to each audio file carefully.

Oh man. This is THE ONLY REASON why AI at scale works...and it's entirely powered by extremely repetitive classification done by people in third-world countries (for now; there are similar jobs in US and Canada for harder domains like math and law). It's definitely the biggest reason why autonomous driving works.

(Cornell, who maintains Merlin, probably has students do it, though I know there is data crowdsourcing in the app too.)

As far as I understand it, classification data is basically the Brent crude of the AI industry (well that and the datasets used for training LLMs).

There was a great investigative article done by The Verge that built a piece around interviews of people at a data labelling center in Kenya and other African countries: https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int....

It paid well for the area until the company that spun up these services decided to move operations to SEA to save on cost. I'll try and link to it if I can find it.

Here are similar articles on this topic:

- https://www.vice.com/en/article/china-ai-dominance-relies-on...

- https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-66514287

- https://old.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1r7q...

It's actually insane how sparingly this is discussed when talking about advancements in AI.

iNaturalist