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Amazon's Mechanical Turk
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Nov 04, 2005 08:51 AM
from the no-one-in-the-box dept.
from the no-one-in-the-box dept.
rscoggin writes "Amazon.com has a new program that wants you to 'Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it.' (example: 'Is there a pizza parlour in this photograph?'). For each task you complete you get a small payment, usually ranging from a few cents to a little under a dollar. It's named the Amazon Mechanical Turk after a famous hoax from the 19th century. Kill time and get paid in tiny increments to boot!" Similar to Google Answers, there seems to be a reliability ratings system and some incentives.
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Paying People to Argue With You 397 comments
Bennett Haselton has written in with an essay on a strange experiment on-line. He starts
When you first hear about
Amazon.com's
"Mechanical Turk" service, which allows "requesters" to pay
"Turk workers" a few pennies to complete some task which is hard to automate but easy for humans,
what's the first application that comes to your mind? The system has been
discussed previously on
Slashdot, but I'll bet a week's wages for a Mechanical Turk worker
($1.45, according to one of them)
that I was the first person who used it to pay people to write rebuttals to one of my arguments.
Keep reading unless you want to fight about it.
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Great... (Score:5, Funny)
GOOD JOB AMAZON
Re:Great... (Score:5, Funny)
i can see it already... (Score:5, Funny)
- Is there a donkey in the picture ?
- Can you see the can of whipped cream ?
- is there chocolate paint involved..
Advanced indexing of Pr0n, humanity is moving forward, no doubt.
This could be brilliant. (Score:5, Insightful)
So this is going mainstream now... (Score:5, Informative)
According to this earlier Slashdot report [slashdot.org], the spam industry has been doing this for awhile with free porn.
I'm curious to know if Amazon is going to use the cumulative results to try to "train" computers, or if it really is just for the money. The requirements include being over 18, so you can't pimp your kids to click through this stuff for cash (though I'm sure it will happen).
Doesn't pay enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that it's not really worth it. Consider the following task, for example:
Guess how much you get paid for that. 2 dollars? 3? That wouldn't be unreasonable, I think, considering that you're supposed to write an entire product description from scratch for which additional "research" is required. The actual amount paid is only 65 cents, though.
Maybe it's just me, but if I check to see how much I need to work in my regular job to make 65 cents, then it does not make any sense to invest more than a few minutes into a task like this, and it seems that it would take more than that to actually complete it. The fact that there's a review required afterwards doesn't exactly make things better, either - if what you did gets rejected, then you've essentially worked for nothing (I wonder if there's anything that keeps amazon from still using your description in this case, too...).
In other words, the whole thing seems like a good idea in theory, but it won't really take off until they're willing to actually pay you a reasonable amount.
Re:Doesn't pay enough (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Doesn't pay enough (Score:5, Insightful)
100 images / hour * $0.03 / image == $3.00 / hour.
So, you've just busted your ass to crank through one image every 36 seconds for a solid hour, and you have three dollars to show for it. There are definitely parts of the world where that would be a fantastic income, but my home country isn't one of them.
3 cents for 1 hours work? (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds interesting but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds interesting but.... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, mturk.amazon.com [amazon.com] redirects you to www.mturk.com [mturk.com]... seems to imply something.
Re:Sounds interesting but.... (Score:5, Informative)
The whois info looks a bit dodgy. I would have expected Amazon knew how to properly register domains...
Registrant:
MTAI, Inc.
P.O. Box 80626
Seattle, Washington 98108
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com
Domain Name: MTURK.COM
Created on: 22-Oct-01
Expires on: 22-Oct-06
Last Updated on: 11-Oct-05
Administrative Contact:
Hostmaster, MTAI mechturk1@hotmail.com
MTAI, Inc.
P.O. Box 80626
Seattle, Washington 98108
United States
2065794562 Fax --
Technical Contact:
Hostmaster, MTAI mechturk1@hotmail.com
MTAI, Inc.
P.O. Box 80626
Seattle, Washington 98108
United States
2065794562 Fax --
Re:Sounds interesting but.... (Score:5, Informative)
How long until some sick slashdotter posts the ... (Score:5, Funny)
Contracting work worth big bucks (Score:5, Insightful)
After a quick review of the available tasks, I must say this looks like a huge scam. Most of the tasks are marketing oriented (e.g. copywriting, photo manipulation), for which experienced contractors get paid $30 to $50 per hour.
Only 75 cents to research and write a complete automotive product description? Are they kidding? Sure, they say I can copy the description from the manufacturer's Web site, but my time is still worth more than that. Besides, I think it's the responsibility of the manufacturer to make sure their Amazon listing is correct. That's how they do it on IMDB.
I can only hope the program will make more sense as they add more requesters and more tasks.
Good idea but for work required it should pay more (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only will the work most likely be shoddy, but it seems like they are trying to replace someone else's job by using this cheap online service.
Yes, for some it may provide rewards but if you calculate the amount of time spent on each item VS. the payment reward (usually a few pennies) it is just not worth someone's free time.
Why don't they just hire a staff of people to work on these 'HITS'?
Willing to compete with the Indians? (Score:5, Insightful)
Profit? (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Use the API to find a HIT, and sign up to complete it.
2) Create a new HIT that basically asks someone to complete the first HIT,
only for $0.01 less than the original HIT was offering.
3) Do this for every existing HIT.
4) Profit?
Philip K. Dick (Score:5, Interesting)
Quick -- someone patent that storyline and sue Amazon for infringement!
Re:Philip K. Dick (Score:5, Informative)
Agent Smith, is that you? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't say I didn't warn you.
automating this (Score:5, Interesting)
For the image ones, couldn't you create 5 bots each with a different account and each one picks a different image and one picks None of these? One of them would be approved and you'd get paid, right?
Also if they are having humans approve your image selection before you get paid, isn't that as much effort as you making your original choice?
Message from Amazon Mechanical Turk Team (Score:5, Informative)
Re:CAPTCHAs (Score:5, Informative)
Subject: Thesis Oral - Luis von Ahn
November 2, 2005
Luis von Ahn
12:00 PM, 3305 Newell-Simon Hall
Thesis Oral
Title: Human Computation
Abstract:
Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to
challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This thesis
introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve
problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to
solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel
approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games.
For example, the ESP Game, introduced in this thesis, is an enjoyable
online game -- many people play over 40 hours a week -- and when people
play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These
keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image
search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because
they enjoy it.
I introduce three other examples of games with a purpose: Peekaboom,
which helps determine the location of objects in images, Phetch, which
collects paragraph descriptions of arbitrary images to help
accessibility of the Web, and Verbosity, which collects common-sense
knowledge. I also show that, in principle, every problem that could be
solved by a computer, today or in the future, could be solved using
enjoyable computer games.
In addition, I introduce CAPTCHAs, automated tests that humans can pass
but computer programs cannot. CAPTCHAs take advantage of human
processing power in order to differentiate humans from computers, an
ability that has important applications in practice.
The results of this thesis are currently in use by hundreds of Web sites
and companies around the world, and some of the games presented here
have been played by over 100,000 people. Practical applications of this
work include improvements in problems such as: image search,
adult-content filtering, spam, common-sense reasoning, computer vision,
accessibility, and security in general.
Thesis Committee:
Manuel Blum, Chair
Takeo Kanade
Michael Reiter
Josh Benaloh, Microsoft Research
Jitendra Malik, University of California, Berkeley
Re:$/hr (Score:5, Informative)
There is an API, maybe if someone made a page that just displays the images and sends in the result when you click on the image instead of having to click twice for each HIT, you could go faster and make much more money.