Dec
02
2005Amazon Mechanical Turk
02
2005
Amazon has launched a site called “Amazon Mechanical Turk“. Yes, really. What is it? Well, it’s a service that lets people earn money by doing things that people can do better than computers. They call it “artificial artificial intelligence”.
For example, the first task that I checked out involved determining the artist and title and of CD based on an image of the CD’s cover. This is absolutely trivial for a human to do, but nearly impossible for a computer. So, they set up an easy way for you to take on the task, and they’ll pay you 2 cents for each image you process.
I did exactly this for about 15 minutes and made 52 cents. Obviously you won’t get rich by “turking”, but it’s probably more cost-effective than collecting aluminum cans.
What does “Mechanical Turk” mean, anyway? Well, just ask Wikipedia.
I think you’re right on Turking being somewhere between aluminum cans and independant wealth, but it may be closer to the other side of the spectrum than you insinuated. Right now the system is at the lowest point (inre: profit-per-person) since its creation, this still means ~$8-13/hr for solid work on the Music HITs you mentioned.
This is through use of Greasemonkey/Opera user scripts for improved usability without wholly automating the process, which is of course against the TOS. As an example, here are my stats from 4 hours’ work yesterday at the lowest yield I’ve gotten so far-
Submitted:2461|Accepted:1991|Rejected:467|Pending:3|Earned:$39.82
TMYK
Joel McCoy 12/3/05 @ 2:45 pmJoel,
I didn’t mean to imply that Turking was a waste of time. In fact, I think it’s great that someone finally found a legitimate “pay per click” business model that actually makes sense (remember all the “we pay you to click on ads!” sites back in the day?).
What I’m wondering though is how long until Turking is used for evil? For circumventing CAPTCHAs, etc. Clearly, it’s inevitable..
Jeff 12/3/05 @ 2:59 pmI had the same thought about “click-thru” services or AllAdvantage where the idea was to prompt an unnecessary behavior and then pay someone to do it, which clearly isn’t sustainable. Micropayments for tasks which actually do need to be accomplished seems a far better thought out business model.
And I’m sure the potential for malicious HITs is substantial, but then I really do wonder what the HIT population will look like once Amazon stops giving us the Confirm Artists Names to tread water with. So far the non-Amazon HITs have been French/English translation, Podcast transcription, and Auto Part Description writing- I can’t think of too many projects that have a substantial enough amount of work to be done that gracefully break into HITs as well as the examples we’ve seen so far.
For the CAPTCHAs (though I’m sure that was an example shot from the hip) I can’t think of a way to guarantee any success with that method since most all of them have some timer, and it would be pretty difficult to get the image fed over to the Turk and garner enough responses to do majority rule acceptance before it would expire. Auto-accept is an option, but if someone’s willing to help willfully circumvent CAPTCHAs for a penny, they’re probably not above just submitting ‘69lol’ over and over again.
Joel McCoy 12/3/05 @ 3:37 pm