How WebAwards Is Using World’s First AI-Powered Jury To Better Judge Websites On The Internet

For WebAwards, the business of judging websites has been a long phenomenon. The website was registered back in 1998, barely 8 years after the very first internet browser was developed. But times have changed and so has the internet as an arena. There are now 1.17 Bn websites as of April, 2022, each with its own varied take on design and value. Here is where WebAwards comes with an innovative offer: Deploying the world’s first AI jury to award websites. 

Aptly named Paris, the AI gets its name from the famous character in Greek mythology. For the uninitiated, Homer’s Iliad tells the story of Paris, who participated in the world’s ‘First Beauty Contest.’ He was to choose between three goddesses and was bribed by Aphrodite who offered him the love of the most beautiful woman on Earth, Helen of Sparta.

After nearly 3000 years, Paris comes alive again in the minds and memories of millions of people across the globe with another contest. This time, Paris uses artificial intelligence to grade websites and compares them on a slew of parameters before awarding the best ones.

Sharpened with Machine Learning tools, the AI has been almost 3 years in the making and has been conceptualized to break down processes concerning the ‘beauty’ of these websites. It operates on a host of parameters and judges it on a slew of variables including creativity, originality, technology, and user-friendliness.

Elaborating further on the process, WebAwards.com PR Executive, Deniz Senturk, said, “Of course, beauty is composed of several components. One of the questions in beauty pageants is the number of languages a candidate knows, even though knowing a foreign language has nothing to do with beauty. In this respect, Paris the AI understands not only the design but also the technology behind a website. A beautiful website has to be fast, secure, user friendly. Creativity, originality, and content are also a part of (website’s) beauty.”

Implementing the AI

While it is easier to conceptualize an artificial intelligence, but, where do we get the data to train it? The company reportedly fed public data into the platform that involved 80,000 decisions delivered by human beings under various conditions in the last 20 years. 

This helped the AI train better and emphasize the role of various variables involved in the process and their effect on the result. Highlighting how WebAwards trained the AI, Deniz Senturk said, “Is there a correlation between colors used on a website, and the voting behavior of the juries? If we add another parameter such as weather on the day of the voting, does that make the correlation between a positive verdict stronger or not? Can an artificial brain imitate the voting behavior of a human jury?”

It is these ideas that formed the bedrock of the platform which eventually led to a bigger organization that took all this information and tabulated better results.

What About The Abstract Nature Of Art?

One pertinent point about art that is deliberated every time is that it is subjective. Our experiences and the very upbringing are what attract us to art, or not thereof. So, the question becomes evident here how can we set parameters to judge the very facet of art? While some may be affected deeply by Cubism, others may find solace in the modernist art movement. Does that render a particular perspective pointless?

Even while it is true that beauty is in the eyes of a beholder and may be purely subjective, the very idea of judging something works on certain parameters. Even while each individual has their own definition of beauty, the verdicts of judges evaluating websites have strong similarities or correlations.

This is where Paris plays a pivotal role. It sieves through a host of data to find patterns and then evaluates those to consolidate them into parameters to judge these websites. So, essentially, Paris’ ML processes ameliorate a judge’s ‘awareness’ of his predispositions based on what he had previously done to grade a website better. It also collates data from other members of the jury to better tabulate those results and reflects them in its choices. 

AI is a better way to judge these websites and as more and more of these websites spring up across the internet, AI looks like the clear choice. With more data, Paris can better optimize its choices and will lead to ever more polished results. While the future looks positive for artificial intelligence juries, the human ones too have their own place in society. Together, they can complement each other and lead the foundation for a better tomorrow.