1y ago

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

www.404media.co

17 comments

Being a Turk myself: what do I have to do, to get my money?
After looking into this: is this name racist?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
  
  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.
  
  It's actually a pretty accurate and slightly clever name haha
- Are you a ... young turk?
  
  Nah, old fart turk.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
What's a turker? I've never heard that term before, aside from final fantasy viii.
- 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.
- If you can't guess it, you could read the first sentence of the article.
  
  "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).
  
  Read the first paragraphs of the article (till the paywall), still have no clue what a "turk" is.
  Maybe I'm just dense.

17 comments