Amazon Turkers Who Train AI Say They’re Locked Out of Their Work and Money

altima_neo , 2 months ago

What's a turker? I've never heard that term before, aside from final fantasy viii.

elmicha , 2 months ago

If you can't guess it, you could read the first sentence of the article.

ironhydroxide , 2 months ago

Read the first paragraphs of the article (till the paywall), still have no clue what a "turk" is.

Maybe I'm just dense.

Evilcoleslaw , 2 months ago

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a service where people can do simple tasks for small amounts of money. Usually things you would expect to be automated, especially in this day and age. I did it for a bit about a decade or so ago. Things like small amounts of proofreading, transcription, etc.

The name is a reference to a hoax device made in the late 1700s that was supposedly a chess playing automaton. In actuality it was operated by a person hiding within. It was nicknamed the Mechanical Turk because it had a model of the head and torso of a person dressed in Ottoman robes, etc.

ABCDE , 2 months ago

"A workers rights group for Mechanical Turk workers says that at least dozens of MTurk workers have been suddenly locked out of the Amazon-owned microlabor platform, suggesting a widespread issue that is denying these people the ability to work and in some cases denying them access to money they have already made on the platform."

Yea, that really helped (it didn't).

BombOmOm , 2 months ago

Amazon has a service called Mechanical Turk. Businesses put up listings for small jobs and random people complete the small jobs for a set amount of money. The jobs are things like 'transcribe this lecture' or 'fill out this survey'. The goal is to connect small jobs with low-skill workers.

Some of the tasks are more involved than that and require proof of knowledge. But, that is the gist.

menemen , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Being a Turk myself: what do I have to do, to get my money?

After looking into this: is this name racist?

AbidanYre , 2 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk

Lmaydev , 2 months ago

It's actually a pretty accurate and slightly clever name haha

Evilcoleslaw , 2 months ago

The machine consisted of a life-sized model of a human head and torso, with a black beard and grey eyes,[6] and dressed in Ottoman robes and a turban—"the traditional costume", according to journalist and author Tom Standage, "of an oriental sorcerer". Its left arm held a long Ottoman smoking pipe while at rest, while its right lay on the top of a large cabinet

So, I mean, as a reference to the historical device perhaps not racist but the origin of the name is probably kinda racist.

vikingqueef OP , 2 months ago

Are you a ... young turk?

menemen , 2 months ago

Nah, old fart turk.

BombOmOm , 2 months ago

Amazon Turk pays like trash too. Though, if you have a favorable currency conversion ratio, might not be bad for you.

Looked into it a few years ago to see if I could use it for some extra spending money when I was bored. Wasn't worth it.

Evil_incarnate , 2 months ago

Yeah, I played with it a couple of times to see what it was like. I now have about eighty cents in us currency sitting in my PayPal. Woo.

catloaf , 2 months ago

I did it years ago when I was a teenager with no real job. There were a bunch of higher-paying jobs like lecture transcription that would be a few bucks each. I made enough to buy a GPU off Amazon (~$80, some of which was from a leftover gift card).

Now I'm sure that ML-AI can do those jobs much faster and cheaper, for about the same accuracy.

Lmaydev , 2 months ago

They're mainly used to train AI so that would be a bad move

circuitfarmer , 2 months ago

Many companies are using AI to generate AI training data. Most of them are data brokers where the margins are becoming razor thin. It's totally a bad idea, but it is definitely happening.

jeffw , 2 months ago

Go back a decade and it was a little better. I used some scripts that optimized things, along with the Turkopticon community this article mentions and a subreddit for high paying tasks.