How TikTok dances trained an AI to see

And remember the Mannequin Challenge? Yep, they used that too.

The quest for computer vision requires lots of data — including real world images. But that can be hard to find, which has led researchers to look in some pretty creative places.

The above video shows how researchers used Tik Tok dances and the Mannequin Challenge to train AI. The quest is for “ground truth” — real world examples that can be used to train or grade an AI on its guesses. Tik Tok datasets provide this by showing lots of movement, clothing types, backgrounds, and people. That diversity is key to train a model that can handle the randomness of the real world.

The same thing happens with the Mannequin Challenge — all those people pretending to stand still gave researchers — and their models — more real world data to train with than they ever could have hoped for.

Watch the above video to learn more.

Further Reading:

Here’s the original project pages for each researcher in the video:

[OmegaGlops]

Using old Mannequin Challenge videos for training a depth prediction model is such a wildly clever idea! 🤯

[braveheartbob]

i really like how phil is so personable, it feels like he's casually having a conversation with just me.
a great presenter

[johnchessant]

That’s actually insanely cool. A bizarre social trend from years ago becomes the weirdly perfect dataset for these computer vision models. Those researchers literally couldn’t have asked for better

[ifur]

I believe that the challenges are a way to collect data to train AI.
Not just TikTok,
People share photos from their childhood, teens and adult versions. No wonder how good those filters work 😂
Some challenges are just in line with AI data projects that I’ve rolled in.

[JaykPuten]

Phil's shower dance is 100% ground and life truth

[napoleonibonaparte]

Never thought I'd see a day when the mannequin challenge becomes useful.

[andybaldman]

The whole point of tiktok has ways been AI. People fear China getting stronger than us, but you’re helping them every time you use that app. Great job.

[TravisNeilson]

Everything is a training set. You use to be an advertising target, now you are a training set.

[OmarDelawar]

New drinking game: Take a shot whenever you hear "ground truth" while watching this video.

[dsquareddan]

Imagine if your entire purpose in life was to watch tiktok dance videos endlessly.

When the robot uprising happens I bet this one will be extra cruel in return for what we made it do 😂

[misael.maced]

I'm loving these AI-themed videos from Phil!

[xoFess]

I appreciate you guys showing the titles of the papers you’re citing, other channels could learn from this!

[TheFawz]

If it's free, then you are the product

[kbtiest]

Never thought Mannequin Challenge can use on it!

[feliperocha]

Though the methodology is fascinating, the actual question is what will this research be applied on? I can imagine predictive vigilance and ever-expanding tracking and warfare capabilities. It'd also be nice to know who has funded all of these researches.

[LinfordMellony]

It's scary to think that AI companies can use data like this even if it's to train an AI. I guess it's the same way with how image generators like Bluewillow was trained with a few differences.

[FunderDuck]

Don’t most people post things online to communicate with friends or have fun? When did we sign up for collecting data and training machines?

[ajbxe]

لقد تاب اللّٰـهُ علىٰ من هو أغلظ منك جُرمًا، وأشدُّ منك ذنبًا

فلا تقنط من رحمة اللّٰـه.❤

[HeisenbergFam]

Imagine if this video was AI generated and it turned out Vox was never real to begin with

[DigitalicaEG]

They didn’t “use” the mannequin challenge, they created the mannequin challenge.