Horror Stories From Inside Amazon's Mechanical Turk (gizmodo.com) 114
From a report: The workers of Mechanical Turk, Amazon's on-demand micro-task platform, say they have encountered mutilated bodies, graphic videos of botched surgeries, and what appeared to be child pornography. They say they have been asked to transcribe Social Security numbers and other personal data. Sometimes their temporary bosses, "requesters" in Amazon's parlance, allegedly ask their anonymized employees to send along their underwear, take photos of their feet, or to draw pictures of their genitals. They say they have been paid to recount traumatic instances in their lives -- a cancer diagnosis, severe depression, or the death of a loved one -- often for less than a dollar. These are some of 1,100 responses to two surveys Gizmodo recently posed to gig workers on Mechanical Turk asking for their experiences using the platform. Unlike the tribulations of Amazon's warehouse workers, which have been well documented, the experiences of gig workers on Mechanical Turk are far less visible.
Yes But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to diminish their plight, but we here on Slashdot regularly have to wade through metaphorical rivers of muck, and we get paid nothing.
We are also requested to fill out ever more demeaning and pointless surveys.
Re:Yes But... (Score:4, Informative)
The door is over there on the left.
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Ignoring problems is stagnation. The first ingredient of solutions is identification.
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Not to diminish their plight, but we here on Slashdot regularly have to wade through metaphorical rivers of muck, and we get paid nothing. We are also requested to fill out ever more demeaning and pointless surveys.
The door is over there on the left.
Given his/her complaints, I imagine the door would be on the right.
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We are also requested to fill out ever more demeaning and pointless surveys.
I've been here quite a while, and I don't recall ever being asked to fill out a survey.
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Have you forgotten CowboyNeal already?! So sad, so so sad.
The answer is CowboyNeal. Never forget.
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Each generation has to go through their own learning curve before they discover the shortcuts that their predecessors had to discover.
It's CowboyNeal, all the way down.
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But he's your great-grandpa! If he forgot everything, he should remember. Age is so cruel.
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We are also requested to fill out ever more demeaning and pointless surveys.
I've been here quite a while, and I don't recall ever being asked to fill out a survey.
Cowboy Neal
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Please answer this survey:
How do you like your panties?
1) In a bunch.
2) Un-bunched.
When you take viagra you take:
1) one Pill
2) Two pills
3) More than two pills.
Re:Yes But... (Score:5, Informative)
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I just turned off the sidebar. Or maybe I ad-blocked it. Not sure.
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We are also requested to fill out ever more demeaning and pointless surveys.
And I salute you for your brave contributions. Seriously though, just switch over to the RSS feed. I think that will help you out a bit. But just my two cents, if you want to wade the homepage more power to you.
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They're not as fun as they used to be though.
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In other words, we're the real victims here?
The other side (Score:5, Informative)
While the vast majority of respondents did not offer a reason for why they started using the platform, 10 percent mentioned that they use Mechanical Turk to supplement their income from another full- or part-time job. Five percent mentioned that they started with Mechanical Turk after having been laid-off from another job. And four percent said they have a medical condition that prevents them from full-time employment.
“I love working on mturk...”, one respondent wrote, “...im disabled so mturk gave me back my self confidence, and i don’t have to depend on my daughter for every little thing now, I was able to get my grand kids christmas presents.” Another worker said, “I am unable to hold a traditional job due to my health, but because of extenuating circumstances, I do not qualify for disability. So, when I discovered Mechanical Turk, it was a Godsend. Mechanical Turk allows me to be able to work within my limitations, which is really helping to build my confidence back up. I know I’m not making a livable wage doing this, but that’s OK. It’s a heck of a lot better than nothing.”
There's also some other bits that have a bit of black humor in them:
As one worker tells it, they were once working for a requester who wanted “many images of my feet in different positions with socks and without socks.” Since the requestor allegedly never paid, never responded to the workers’ inquiries, but still received the images before ultimately rejecting the job, they concluded that the HIT was probably a scam. “But I always wonder what happened to all those pictures of feet that he collected.”
I wonder why anyone would even want to know that.
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I once read a story about a guy who got sent to a psychiatric hospital for having sex with a bicycle and the exhaust of a car ( assume the car had been stationary for some time or burns may have ocurred!! ), another about a guy who got sexually excited by pencils to the point he pushed them into his uretha.
Some people have quite deviant and very odd fetishes and feet is nothing new. Someone collecting pictures of something as mundane as feet may be simply a picture collector of odd images or a huge stack o
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Maybe he just got tired of guys at the gym calling him pencil dick.
Actual mutilated bodies? (Score:4, Funny)
Or have workers encountered pictures of mutilated bodies?
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So stop doing it (Score:5, Insightful)
Every minute these people spend on this activity is 100% voluntary. They can stop any time and restart any time (or never). Don't call them tribulations when the people experiencing them are in complete control of everything that they are doing 100% of the time.
Sensationalism skips over the real problems(s) (Score:4, Interesting)
Every minute these people spend on this activity is 100% voluntary. They can stop any time and restart any time (or never). Don't call them tribulations when the people experiencing them are in complete control of everything that they are doing 100% of the time.
Given that apparently some of the people are getting stiffed on payment, I think that does count as a tribulation. Considering that scam postings almost certainly cost Amazon money as well as intangibles, long-term I think it would benefit them to require payment be placed in escrow either before the job is listed or before you can receive any work product. They can talk to their legal department on the best way to CYA on the escrow requirement, and make their legal department less depressed on being typically paid to do boring stuff & be ignored. (It might be possible for them to branch out and offer escrow services themselves, or just serve as a 3rd party who will handle verification.)
Some of this also may be not entirely legal for Amazon to be involved with at all--I would sincerely doubt Amazon would want to be a test case for any claim of "Not Our Circus, Not Our Monkeys" on their liability for CP. The sensitive information might well also be a liability they won't want to deal with--just because you can possibly afford the lawyers doesn't mean you can afford the PR. Maybe they should consider having 'screening task postings' as an ongoing task they pay for themselves...with perhaps bonuses for people with good accuracy rates in flagging, and that part of the cost to post a task in the first place.
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Scarcity.. for I assume food, shelter, clothing, medical care? We have an issue with the last one, though it is always available via emergency rooms as a last resort, but none of the rest are scarce in the US, comrade. So you point fails to stand.
Now, if you mean scarcity for a nicer phone, a better apartment, more 'stuff' then sure, I guess (*wanking motion*).
Re:So stop doing it (Score:4, Informative)
Try being poor and having cancer. The ER will NOT provide you with surgery, chemotherapy or radiation. If your tumor is causing you to bleed from an open sore, the ER will put a bandaid on your open sore and send you on your way.
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0 people are earning enough money on Mechanical Turk to pay for cancer treatment.
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If they are so easily available, why aren't you out providing room, board and medical care to the masses?
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Same reason you aren't, I give more of a shit about buying more junk for me and my family. I freely admit i could help people with, say, $2K vs spending it on a TV. Yet I buy the TV.
And so do bleeding heart liberals, they just ignore the cognitive dissonance.
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You do know you still get billed in the ER, even if there's no way in hell you can ever pay it off, right?
Also, the ER will not give you the prescriptions you need in order to not have a life threatening medical problem.
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Well if it comes down to trauma vs not eating or unable to buy medication. The Trauma from the job is the better option.
Saying it is there fault for doing the job they were told to do, is just being a cruel person. Ok Trauma is the better option, but it isn't an option that should be given. Amazon needs to give these workers a way to report and refuse jobs which are just dealing with the worst part of humanity.
Re:So stop doing it (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, if your circumstances allow you to stop earning money while you look for another job, that's a rational choice.
I grew up comfortable, but in a working class neighborhood where many of my friends' parents were struggling to live paycheck to paycheck. They weren't poor because they didn't work hard. They were poor because they didn't have any money.
The most important thing money buys you is time. If you're job is crummy, and you have enough money in the bank that you can spend a month looking for a better job, a year from now you'll have even *more* money in the bank. If you need this week's paycheck or else next week your family is homeless, chances are good that a year from now you'll be in the same place.
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If you're job is crummy, and you have enough money in the bank that you can spend a month looking for a better job, a year from now you'll have even *more* money in the bank. If you need this week's paycheck or else next week your family is homeless, chances are good that a year from now you'll be in the same place.
In every job switch I've made since I graduated from college ages ago my last day was a Friday and my first day at the new job was the following Monday. During this time I've changed jobs 4 times yet never required a month off nor taken a break between jobs. I'm going to have to disagree with your assertion.
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Congratulations on your good luck. Not everyone is that fortunate.
Also, you're missing the *time* component of this discussion. You had time to search for that next job because your previous job(s) did not consume all of your time.
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You need to work on your logic skills. Yes, there exists some persons such that those persons mismanged themselves into bankruptcy (which is *very* different from poverty, by the way). It does not follow that anyone who is poor mismanaged their finances.
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I know of at least two poor families who definitely are poor because they mismanaged their finances.
When they had money, they bought expensive cars, over the top vacations, and stupid things while many around them didn't. They were the people with all the toys on the block.
When things got bad, they had nothing to fall back on, and no way to get out of a dying industry.
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I grew up surrounded by poor families. Money management was never an issue because they never had any. It came in and went out to groceries and rent.
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So that means EVERYONE does that?
Logic fail.
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I know an orthopedic surgeon who grew up poor and managed to get through med school on a military scholarship, and is of the opinion that if he can do it everyone can, and anyone who doesn't is just lazy. What a profoundly ignorant point of view!
Not everyone is blessed with intelligence, good health, opportunity, or even motivation.
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While I mostly agree with you, motivation, and to a lesser degree health, is something they can do something about. There are so many people slowly killing themselves by drinking and smoking. Even more are just complaining about their lot in life instead of doing something about it.
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There are people who cannot join the military due to terrible injuries they suffered through no fault of their own. No military scholarship for them. Can't earn the money through back breaking labor, their back is already broken.
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Given our economy's winner take all model, Jeff Bezos, the guy with a hell of a lot of the carrots, calls the tune. Because if few enough people have enough of the carrots, they're indistinguishable from sticks (assuming one's in the habit of eating). I'm glad things have gone well enough for you that you don't get that. That's not everyone'
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Sure, it's the middle-class dream. Got it. Say hi to Ayn for me, 'k?
Yes and no (Score:1)
Technically North Korea is a Democracy, and everybody's there "voluntarily". That's an extreme example, but a less extreme example is living in a city where the jobs suddenly shift overseas and now you have no money for food. Should you be able to sell yourself into slavery for food?
You used to be able to, it was called indentured servitude. In the late 20th century it was decided that a contrac
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slavery - the state of being a slave.
slave - a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.
So, no. Not here anyway.
Bullshit. Tell that to the
You do know what the word "defacto" means (Score:2)
Also "Technically".
You're literally contradicting yourself. North Koreans aren't "literal" slaves unless they are themselves called slaves. They may be defacto slaves though. You might be too, if your country keeps up it's current trajectory (assuming your not in one of the more liberal Nordic or European countries).
And, uh, yeah, having 100% of the population vote one way would make it a democracy, provided those votes were real and were n
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So if all the companies went away, would these people be better off as subsistence farmers? Hunter gatherers?
In a free country, you are free to alienate your labor for an agreed upon price. This is what is happening here. Whining that the people have no choice when they clearly do is complete nonsense.
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If they had sufficient land for subsistence farming or access to a sufficiently large area they could gather from, subsistence farming or hunting and gathering might well be better choices for them, but those options have been foreclosed in most places.
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You can't unsee things (Score:2)
Saying you can quit after you're exposed to it is kinda beside the point, because by that point the damage has already been done. Sure you can quit and stop subse
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Every minute these people spend on this activity is 100% voluntary. They can stop any time and restart any time (or never). Don't call them tribulations when the people experiencing them are in complete control of everything that they are doing 100% of the time.
You are a moron. The point is that they are specifically not volunteering to see images of mutilated bodies and so on.
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How much horror is it? (Score:2)
They choose their gigs!
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They don't know what the gig is until they take it. "you're going to be looking at photos and providing feedback on their emotional content" doesn't say you're going to be looking at mutilated corpses or tortured animals.
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"you're going to be looking at photos and providing feedback on their emotional content" doesn't say you're going to be looking at mutilated corpses or tortured animals.
Yes. Yes, it does say that. If you're fully literate, anyways.
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When it first started I did some HITs just to check it out. They were apparently developing a training data set for street address recognition and there were a lot of "tell us which photos have a visible number on a building" micro-jobs. Those were the golden days... almost felt like a game.
Then those HITs disappeared and in their place were a bunch of people trying to get you to answer personal info surveys, or help SEO by positing URLs to a website or forum. The only decent HITs left were some audio tr
Disturbing (Score:5, Funny)
I find this story very disturbing.
These are the kinds of things we used to get unpaid interns to do. Now we have to pay Amazon for the same work? Before anyone else stoops to using Mechanical Turk, I hope you'll stop and think about what you're doing to the market of valuble, no-paying jobs.
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talk about sensationalistic (Score:5, Interesting)
The vast majority of people driving are clothed, according to truckers who have additional perspective into people's habits in their cars. Here and there, there are reports of people driving in what might be considered an otherwise embarrassing state of dress. Does that mean that OHMIGODEVERYDRIVERISNEKKED!!!?!?!?!
No. But, could you write a sensationalistic headline like TRUCKERS FORCED TO VIEW MUTILATED BODIES, GRAPHIC IMAGES, NAKED CHILDREN to click-bait people into an article about the rare instances of truckers getting an eyeful in what most would consider an incredibly boring job of long-haul driving? Sure, you could write it. Would it be accurate? Only in the narrowest of senses: it might better be considered a lie of omission.
As for Mechanical Turk, I've come close to posting some HITs when I needed lots and lots of eyeballs to view something really mundane -- to tell me whether a collection of computer-generated English sentences were natural-sounding or awkward, so that I could fine-tune the generation algorithm. Given the pricing and setup, that would seem to be more-or-less the normal sort of work on Mechanical Turk: incremental, doesn't take much effort, lots of iterations, requires a human. Apparently there are people who find that sort of work fulfilling based on other comments here, and without being disparaging or judgemental on why that might be the case, I'm now disappointed that I didn't follow through with setting it up. I mean, if I can help someone feel empowered by giving them something to do while benefiting my work at a reasonable cost, there's nearly a moral imperative to do so.
Maybe Mechanical Turk isn't the best way to arrange that sort of piece-work, but are there any other ways?
Hoomans! (Score:2)
They just occasionally kidnap one of us for study to try to understand why it is we're so fucked up.
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https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki... [wiktionary.org]
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What a perfect word to describe the way I feel about Trump and the GOP!
Thank you!
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progress (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a time when we looked at the future and expected the best. Machines would do the "bad" work and humans would gain more prosperity and more free time, being able to focus on creative work, art and science.
What came of that? Ah yeah, the dream of becoming filthy rich with a startup (after working for next to nothing for some years, and a tiny chance of actually succeeding at that dream), a complete focus on stock prices (when I was a kid, nobody outside the finance industry gave a shit about them and they were only mentioned on TV news when a really serious crash happened) and, of course, the largest transfer of wealth from everyone to a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of super-rich in the history of our species.
What happened to the dreams of a better world? Now we're again afraid of climate change the way we were afraid of WW3, and just surviving seems enough.
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That's the paradox, the world is clearly a better place than ever but negative thoughts dominate.
Sure, everything didn't turned out as bright as we dreamed it would be. As expected for dreams. But things did improve, why not keep dreaming?
Machine do the "bad" work. Just not all of it. Unfulfilling jobs and worker exploitation still exist, but there is less of it now, and besides a few exceptions, the situation is improving everywhere in the world.
Talk about prosperity? Many thing that were only available to
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But thanks to progress, we are not in a zero-sum game. If the poor are a little better off, and the rich are much better, how can it be a bad thing.
Corrected for inflation, real incomes of both lower and middle class have actually fallen over the past twenty years in many parts of the world.
About the only thing that is more difficult now is housing, a direct result of increasing population density.
Population growth is zero or even negative in the areas (western cities) with the highest increase in housing costs. Population density does not explain the doubling of rents in many European cities, for example.
Agreed that many things are indeed better and improving further. But many, many opportunities to improve life have been traded for stock prices and pseudo-w
Free market (Score:1, Funny)
Please let the invisible hand of the free market sort this out. It solved every problem in society, including human rights.
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Lets not forget the bang-up job the free market has done on health care in the US!
Woohoo!
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You shouldn't get sick if you can't afford to. Live within your means people!
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You should check out the health care in those communist states for comparison.
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Norwegians waiting in clinic waiting rooms for 100's of hours, losing their place in line if they leave or die.
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The opposite, a completely controlled market, has also done exceedingly well.
Nobody in North Korea complains.
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no obesity epidemic in north korea, save for a single case.
Weird... never heard of it... (Score:2)
This is honestly the first time I have heard of Mechanical Turk, but it's apparently been around for quite a while.
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Welcome back, I guess you didn't read slashdot for what, 15 years?
Warning: it isn't a fine wine.
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Welcome back, I guess you didn't read slashdot for what, 15 years?
Warning: it isn't a fine wine.
I did "step away" for a few years. Not only from /., but from most online and all local and "traditional" news. It's surprising how liberating it is, especially with the low signal-to-noise ratio. Even now, I only really check the BBC for news, and even their information has become pretty click-baity and sensationalist. Not as bad as almost EVERYTHING else though. Every few months I kind of "dip my toe" into the cesspool that is mainstream news, and it makes me cringe every time. I just have no need f
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Congratulations on your efforts to control your own reality. Humans are getting rarer and rarer in this Age of Zombies.
Other than the BBC, if I'm curious about news the Reuters feed isn't that bad. It is the same crap stories as on the other sites, but they mostly just list them out instead of all the weird editorial crap and videos that most sites push. The BBC doesn't do as much international coverage as they used to.
Even news sites where I mostly agree with the politics of the editorial staff, the conten
I feel like my brain died (Score:3)
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Here's a short reference for him that can provide for a small, reliable "Funny" mod:
Wonder what a Beowulf cluster of mechturks would look like.
Oblig XKCD: https://dev/null [dev].
In Soviet Turkey mechanical makes you!
Something about Portman and Grits; and/or Hookers and Blow.
Now get off of my lawn, you insensitive clod!
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Am I anywhere close to right?
Yes, exactly correct.
There are also things like web programming jobs where you can paste together web apps for 12 cents an hour, or do custom artwork and business logos for 5 cents an hour.
There is also a lot of data entry, where you go through some company's catalog or user list and paste the fields into a new CMS so some phishing site can get off the ground.
Ghost Work, the book on the microwork horror story (Score:2)
Yikes! The very first author who correctly and accurately explains Fei-Fei Li's machinations - - that self-righteous, grandstanding poseur - - founder of the microwork/micro-task platform, MTurk [and Stanford U. computer science prof, from the PRC originally, affiliated with Google and created ImageNet]. Oooooooooohhhhh, we need more diversity and equality in the workplace, preaches Fei-Fei Li, wh
Plausable deniability (Score:1)
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9 times out of ten we haven't heard of, and purely in a bell curve there's also gonna be cases ten times worse or better.
What in the actual hell is this supposed to mean? Are you insinuating that people are accepting murder for hire contracts for $1 through this service? I'm having a hard time imagining what's 10 times worse than child pornography since that's already one of the worst things imaginable. And how does it relate to a bell curve? If you take a bell curve and look at the number of occurrences that are just 4 standard deviations away from the middle it's already unlikely, let alone something like 10-sigma which is
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I'm having a hard time imagining what's 10 times worse than child pornography since that's already one of the worst things imaginable.
It's not. I've seen some when I moderated for a website. It's no where close to the worst thing imaginable. Most commonly it's some kid showing off their crotch and playing with it. Even when there's an adult involved, it's still just really bad porn.
This is one of those things that media lies to you about. Because you can't see it for yourself, they can pretend that seeing it scars you for life or turns you into some kind of monster. In reality, it's less traumatizing than goatse or 2 girls 1 cup.
What was
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I wish I could unread that.
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They extrapolate to the fact a grown adult person has so little caring for the well being of a child they are willing to do that to a person for nothing more than a quick burst of sexual gratification.
I envy your naivete. You should never visit a third-world country where you can find people doing much worse for much less.
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Except for the anonymous (and there is some still) part, you have also described Social Media in general....and it has had some profound and terrible effects on human culture.
I know it seemed like a good idea, but it has proven more divisive than ever and ha
Yeah, keep wasting mod points, you rapists! (Score:2)
Try to silence me as long as you want, ... You're only making the case for you being rapists or child rapists even stronger.
My karma lasts longer than your mod points.
I hope you rot in prison, you sick fucks.