Resolving the Human Subjects Status of Machine Learning's Crowdworkers

In recent years, machine learning (ML) has relied heavily on crowdworkers both for building datasets and for addressing research questions requiring human interaction or judgment. The diverse tasks performed and uses of the data produced render it difficult to determine when crowdworkers are best thought of as workers (versus human subjects). These difficulties are compounded by conflicting policies, with some institutions and researchers regarding all ML crowdworkers as human subjects and others holding that they rarely constitute human subjects. Notably few ML papers involving crowdwork mention IRB oversight, raising the prospect of non-compliance with ethical and regulatory requirements. We investigate the appropriate designation of ML crowdsourcing studies, focusing our inquiry on natural language processing to expose unique challenges for research oversight. Crucially, under the U.S. Common Rule, these judgments hinge on determinations of aboutness, concerning both whom (or what) the collected data is about and whom (or what) the analysis is about. We highlight two challenges posed by ML: the same set of workers can serve multiple roles and provide many sorts of information; and ML research tends to embrace a dynamic workflow, where research questions are seldom stated ex ante and data sharing opens the door for future studies to aim questions at different targets. Our analysis exposes a potential loophole in the Common Rule, where researchers can elude research ethics oversight by splitting data collection and analysis into distinct studies. Finally, we offer several policy recommendations to address these concerns.