Amazon Mechanical Turk: Краудсорсинг и удаленная работа

Micro work service subsidiary of Amazon
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing website with which businesses can hire remotely located "crowdworkers" to perform discrete on demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do as economically. It is operated under Amazon Web Services, and is owned by Amazon. Employers, known as requesters, post jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), such as identifying specific content in an image or video, writing product descriptions, or answering survey questions. Workers, colloquially known as Turkers or crowdworkers, browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a fee set by the requester. To place jobs, requesters use an open application programming interface (API), or the more limited MTurk Requester site. as of April 2019, requesters could register from 49 approved countries.

The service was conceived by Venky Harinarayan in a U. S. patent disclosure in 2001. Amazon coined the term artificial artificial intelligence for processes that outsource some parts of a computer program to humans, for those tasks carried out much faster by humans than computers. It is claimed that Jeff Bezos was responsible for proposing the development of Amazon's Mechanical Turk to realize this process. The name Mechanical Turk was inspired by "The Turk", an 18th century chess playing automaton made by Wolfgang von Kempelen that toured Europe, and beat both Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. It was later revealed that this "machine" was not an automaton, but a human chess master hidden in the cabinet beneath the board and controlling the movements of a humanoid dummy. Analogously, the Mechanical Turk online service uses remote human labor hidden behind a computer interface to help employers perform tasks that are not possible using a true machine. MTurk launched publicly on November 2, 2005. Its user base grew quickly. In early to mid November 2005, there were tens of thousands of jobs, all uploaded to the system by Amazon itself for some of its internal tasks that required human intelligence. HIT types expanded to include transcribing, rating, image tagging, surveys, and writing. In March 2007, there were reportedly more than 100,000 workers in over 100 countries. That year, Techlist published an interactive map pinpointing the locations of 50,000 of their MTurk workers around the world. By 2018, research demonstrated that while over 100,000 workers were available on the platform at any time, only around 2,000 were actively working.

Workers have been primarily located in the United States since the platform's inception with demographics generally similar to the overall Internet population in the U. S. Within the U. S. workers are fairly evenly spread across states, proportional to each state’s share of the U. S. population. as of 2019, between 15 and 30 thousand people in the U. S. complete at least one HIT each month and about 4,500 new people join MTurk each month. Cash payments for Indian workers were introduced in 2010, which updated the demographics of workers, who however remained primarily within the United States. A website showing worker demographics in May 2015 showed that 80% of workers were located in the United States, with the remaining 20% located elsewhere in the world, most of whom were in India. In May 2019, approximately 60% were in the U. S., 40% elsewhere (approximately 30% in India). In early 2023 about 90% of workers were from the U. S. and about half of the remainder from India.

as of 2010, numerous researchers have explored the viability of Mechanical Turk to recruit subjects for social science experiments. Researchers have generally found that while samples of respondents obtained through Mechanical Turk do not perfectly match all relevant characteristics of the U. S. population, they are also not wildly misrepresentative. As a result, thousands of papers that rely on data collected from Mechanical Turk workers are published each year, including hundreds in top ranked academic journals. A challenge with using MTurk for human subject research has been maintaining data quality. A study published in 2021 found that the types of quality control approaches used by researchers (such as checking for bots, VPN users, or workers willing to submit dishonest responses) can meaningfully influence survey results. They demonstrated this via impact on three common behavioral/mental healthcare screening tools. Even though managing data quality requires work from researchers, there is a large body of research showing how to gather high quality data from MTurk. The cost of using MTurk is considerably lower than many other means of conducting surveys, so many researchers continue to use it. The general consensus among researchers is that the service works best for recruiting a diverse sample; it is less successful with studies that require more precisely defined populations or that require a representative sample of the population as a whole. Many papers have been published on the demographics of the MTurk population. MTurk workers tend to be younger, more educated, more liberal, and slightly less wealthy than the U. S. population overall.

Supervised Machine Learning algorithms require large amounts of human annotated data to be trained successfully. Machine learning researchers have hired Workers through Mechanical Turk to produce datasets such as SQuAD, a question answering dataset.

as of 2007, the service has been used to search for prominent missing individuals. This use was first suggested during the search for James Kim, but his body was found before any technical progress was made. That summer, computer scientist Jim Gray disappeared on his yacht and Amazon's Werner Vogels, a personal friend, made arrangements for DigitalGlobe, which provides satellite data for Google Maps and Google Earth, to put recent photography of the Farallon Islands on Mechanical Turk. A front page story on Digg attracted 12,000 searchers who worked with imaging professionals on the same data. The search was unsuccessful. In September 2007, a similar arrangement was repeated in the search for aviator Steve Fossett. Satellite data was divided into sections, and Mechanical Turk users were asked to flag images with "foreign objects" that might be a crash site or other evidence that should be examined more closely. This search was also unsuccessful. The satellite imagery was mostly within a 50 mile radius, but the crash site was eventually found by hikers about a year later, 65 miles away.

MTurk has also been used as a tool for artistic creation. One of the first artists to work with Mechanical Turk was xtine burrough, with The Mechanical Olympics (2008), Endless Om (2015), and Mediations on Digital Labor (2015). Another work was artist Aaron Koblin's Ten Thousand Cents (2008).

Programmers have developed browser extensions and scripts designed to simplify the process of completing jobs. Amazon has stated that they disapprove of scripts that completely automate the process and preclude the human element. This is because of the concern that the task completion process—e. g. answering a survey—could be gamed with random responses, and the resultant collected data could be worthless. Accounts using so called automated bots have been banned.

Amazon makes available an application programming interface (API) for the MTurk system. The MTurk API lets a programmer submit jobs, retrieve completed work, and approve or reject that work. In 2017, Amazon launched support for AWS Software Development Kits (SDK), allowing for nine new SDKs available to MTurk Users. MTurk is accessible via API from the following languages: Python, JavaScript, Java, NET, Go, Ruby, PHP, or C++. Web sites and web services can use the API to integrate MTurk work into other web applications, providing users with alternatives to the interface Amazon has built for these functions.

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a platform for processing images, a task well suited to human intelligence. Requesters have created tasks that ask workers to label objects found in an image, select the most relevant picture in a group of pictures, screen inappropriate content, classify objects in satellite images, or digitize text from images such as scanned forms filled out by hand.

The minimum payment that Amazon allows for a task is one cent. Because tasks are typically simple and repetitive the majority of tasks pay only a few cents, but there are also well paying tasks on the site. Many criticisms of MTurk stem from the fact that a majority of tasks offer low wages. In addition, workers are considered independent contractors rather than employees. Independent contractors are not protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act or other legislation that protects workers’ rights. Workers on MTurk must compete with others for good HIT opportunities as well as spend time searching for tasks and other actions that they are not compensated for. The low payment offered for many tasks has fueled criticism of Mechanical Turk for exploiting and not compensating workers for the true value of the task they complete. One study of 3.8 million tasks completed by 2,767 workers showed that "workers earned a median hourly wage of about $2 an hour" with 4% of workers earning more than $7.25 per hour. The Pew Research Center and the International Labour Office published data indicating people made around $5.00 per hour in 2015. A study focused on workers in the U. S. indicated average wages of at least $5.70 an hour, and data from the CloudResearch study found average wages of about $6.61 per hour.

The Nation magazine reported in 2014 that some Requesters had taken advantage of Workers by having them do the tasks, then rejecting their submissions in order to avoid paying them. Available data indicates that rejections are fairly rare. Workers report having a small minority of their HITs rejected, perhaps as low as 1%. The system paid people a dollar or two to install a Facebook connected app and answer personal questions. The survey task, as a work for hire, was not used for a demographic or psychological research project as it might have seemed. The purpose was instead to bait the worker to reveal personal information about the worker's identity that was not already collected by Facebook or Mechanical Turk.

Others have criticized that the marketplace does not allow workers to negotiate with employers. In response to criticisms of payment evasion and lack of representation, a group developed a third party platform called Turkopticon which allows workers to give feedback on their employers. This allows workers to avoid potentially unscrupulous jobs and to recommend superior employers. Another platform called Dynamo allows workers anonymously and organize campaigns to better their work environment, such as the Guidelines for Academic Requesters and the Dear Jeff Bezos Campaign. Amazon made it harder for workers to enroll in Dynamo by closing the request account that provided workers with a required code for Dynamo membership. Workers created third party plugins to identify higher paying tasks, but Amazon updated its website to prevent these plugins from working.

Mechanical Turk is comparable in some respects to the now discontinued Google Answers service. However, the Mechanical Turk is a more general marketplace that can potentially help distribute any kind of work tasks all over the world. The Collaborative Human Interpreter (CHI) by Philipp Lenssen also suggested using distributed human intelligence to help computer programs perform tasks that computers cannot do well. MTurk could be used as the execution engine for the CHI. In 2014 the Russian search giant Yandex launched a similar system called Toloka that is similar to the Mechanical Turk.