this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Man, I know people love to throw the word "dystopian" around, but holy shit is that description dystopian as fuck.
I used to do mechanical turk jobs for some quick and easy pocket money. There were several types of tasks you could do, and there was a sort of ranking system to dissuade anyone from just inputting junk instead of answering seriously. I usually stuck to surveys and things I would describe as fancy captchas. I recall a few jobs where the task was to record yourself in different environments reading the same script of text. I can't see that type of job for being anything other than training data for AI/ML
Audio testing? I was involved with a thing like that at one point. For a major telecom. Just a whole room of people of different accents reading the first page of the Great Gatsby and recording.
I was never told exactly what it was for. My suspicion was that it seemed more like acquiring training data for an audio processing machine learning library. This was about 10 years ago, so after the likes of siri, but way before something like chat gpt
Wait until you find out that Amazon pays foreign MTurk "employees" with Amazon vouchers instead of cash.
I actually like the idea. Get simple jobs like quests in a game.
Still, there are issues.
If the revenues generated were fairly distributed, this system would not be a problem at all.
I submitted a few weird requests to mturk just to see how it works. I was able to read a bunch of magazines for cheap by paying people $0.01 for every two scanned pages of any magazine that was no older than 3 editions old.
I ended up with a ton of random digitized magazines, and ended up learning a lot about the kinds of people who do mturk tasks from the magazines they scanned. Seems to mostly be bored housewives, at least 10 years ago when I did this.
I paid for my experiments with the ~$50 I earned from doing mturk tasks myself, and let me tell you, it was miserable stuff. Sub-minimum wage drudgery... At least I suffered myself what I made others suffer with my stupid tasks, and all I got out of it was a bunch of articles I didn't actually want to read.