MTurkin'

So I've been interested in Amazon's Mechanical Turk for a while now. For those of you not in the know, the Mechanical Turk is a service provided by Amazon that creates a market place which allows Requester to post tasks that (putatively) require human intelligence to be completed. Then other users can complete the tasks, and be paid a small fee. It's an interesting platform, and I don't see a lot people talking about it.

Basically there are three main issues about it that interest me. First of all, it is a worldwide market, any one can accept these tasks. How do we ensure that the renumeration is fair? The second is still a little convoluted in my brain. These are tasks which are purported to require human intelligence to be completed. But it seems as if spamming is kind of a problem. It makes perfect sense. I think for now that it's pretty low level stuff, but I imagine it will get more sophisticated. As it does, this starts to get into Turing Test issues. As exploiters figure out ways to automate specific solutions to problems that were previously only do able by humans.

I'm gonna do a few posts about this. I'm planning on trying out being a completer and requester of Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). I've got an idea for a nice tiny project that could use a little human intelligence (finding a character in comic panels). So hey, we'll see what happens.