Data labelling
Data labelling is the human work of tagging examples so a model can learn from them: drawing boxes around cars in photos, marking a message as abusive, or ranking two chatbot answers. Much of it is done by contract workers around the world.
In one line, for a 12-year-old
Data labelling is people putting name tags on examples so the AI knows what it's looking at.
An example
When a website asks you to "click every square with a traffic light", you may be helping label images.
Why it matters to people
AI that looks automatic often rests on human labour that is low-paid and, for content moderation, sometimes distressing. Fair pay and mental-health support for these workers are part of responsible AI.