crowdsourcing

Gold definitionUpdated Apr 2, 2026

Definition

Crowdsourcing involves obtaining services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large, often online, group of people. In research, it's frequently used to recruit participants for empirical studies, such as those investigating human-AI collaboration, where participant behavior and effective incentives are crucial.

At a glance

Executive summary

Crowdsourcing involves distributing tasks to a large group of people, often online, to gather data or complete projects. In research, it's a common way to recruit participants for studies, especially those examining how humans and AI work together, with careful attention paid to how incentives affect participant behavior.

TL;DR

Crowdsourcing is a method where tasks are outsourced to a large, often online, community, commonly used by researchers to find participants for studies, particularly those involving human-AI interaction.

Key points

Distributes tasks to a large, often online, community for collective problem-solving or data collection.
Provides scalable and cost-effective access to human intelligence for tasks requiring judgment or large-scale participation.
Used by researchers in HCI and AI, companies for data annotation, and organizations for content creation and testing.
Offers greater scale, diversity, and flexibility compared to traditional in-house teams or small contractor groups.
Growing focus on optimizing participant engagement and data quality through effective incentive design, especially in human-AI collaboration studies.

Use cases

Recruiting participants for empirical studies on human-AI decision-making, as highlighted in the provided context.
Annotating large datasets for machine learning model training, such as labeling images for object recognition.
Conducting large-scale online surveys and experiments in social sciences or behavioral economics.
Generating creative content, like writing product descriptions or brainstorming marketing ideas.
Testing software or websites for bugs and usability issues across diverse user groups.

Also known as

Microtasking, distributed workforce, human computation, citizen science