The objective assessment of image quality (IQ) has been advocated for the analysis and optimization of medical imaging systems. One method of obtaining such IQ metrics is through a mathematical observer. The Bayesian ideal observer is optimal by definition for signal detection tasks, but is frequently both intractable and non-linear. As an alternative, linear observers are sometimes used for task-based image quality assessment. The optimal linear observer is the Hotelling observer (HO). The computational cost of calculating the HO increases with image size, making a reduction in the dimensionality of the data desirable. Channelized methods have become popular for this purpose, and many competing methods are available for computing efficient channels. In this work, a novel method for learning channels using an autoencoder (AE) is presented. AEs are a type of artificial neural network (ANN) that are frequently employed to learn concise representations of data to reduce dimensionality. Modifying the traditional AE loss function to focus on task-relevant information permits the development of efficient AE-channels. These AE-channels were trained and tested on a variety of signal shapes and backgrounds to evaluate their performance. In the experiments, the AE-learned channels were competitive with and frequently outperformed other state-of-the-art methods for approximating the HO. The performance gains were greatest for the datasets with a small number of training images and noisy estimates of the signal image. Overall, AEs are demonstrated to be competitive with state-of-the-art methods for generating efficient channels for the HO and can have superior performance on small datasets.