#MechanicalTurk workers are using AI to automate being human. Next we train AIs on AI generated data which then leads to #AI dementia (see The Curse of Recursion: Training" on Generated Data Makes Models Forget https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.17493.pdf)

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/14/mechanical-turk-workers-are-using-ai-to-automate-being-human/

Excellent read in Platformer this week recapping a number of developments in the area of synthetic AI training and the implications for wide scale junk content proliferation: The AI is eating itself https://www.platformer.news/p/the-ai-is-eating-itself?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=7976&post_id=131409572&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email #generativeai #chatgpt #ai #marketingai #mechanicalturk

No surprise (I'm currently dealing with other kinds of research scammers), but still OOF.

https://open.substack.com/pub/platformer/p/the-ai-is-eating-itself

#AI #ResearchFraud #MechanicalTurk

Over the past few days on Lobsters, I've put up with yet another complaint about anticapitalists. How dare we problematize the default economic paradigm!?

Today on Lobsters, people are surprised that #MechanicalTurk laborers are using LLMs to complete questionnaires which would be used to train LLMs. Why are they so surprised? This is the race to the bottom which capitalism desires!

A side question, given the high accuracy of classification of human generated vs synthetic text in this paper: if mechanical turk workers are mostly from certain countries, could the authors be training their model to recognise the style of English writing typical of those countries as "human"? Not that it would invalidate their results, but it could impact followup studies. #LLM #MechanicalTurk #ChatGPT #MTurk

What happens when you farm out menial tasks in the age of AI?

If you do Mechanical Turk work you train an AI to do it for you...

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/14/mechanical-turk-workers-are-using-ai-to-automate-being-human/

#fridayfun #ai #mechanicalturk

Artificial Artificial #ArtificialIntelligence: Crowd Workers Widely Use Large Language Models for Text Production Tasks #LargeLanguageModels #LLMs are remarkable data annotators. ...We reran an abstract summarization task from the literature on #Amazon #MechanicalTurk and, through a combination of keystroke detection and #SyntheticText #classification, estimate that 33-46% of #CrowdWorkers used LLMs when completing the task. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.07899.pdf

Overigens wijst @timnitGebru, die pleit voor ethical AI, al langer op de uitbuitingspraktijken van tech bedrijven:

'we urge researchers and journalists to also center low-income workers’ contributions in running the engine of “AI” and to stop misleading the public with narratives of fully autonomous machines with human-like agency.'

https://www.noemamag.com/the-exploited-labor-behind-artificial-intelligence/

@volkskrant @arnokuipers

#AI #AIEthics #EthicalAI #ChatGPT #MechanicalTurk

AI lijkt slim, maar leunt vooral zwaar op - zwaar onderbetaalde - Mechanical Turks.
Goed dat @volkskrant hier onlangs een stuk over had.

https://www.volkskrant.nl/a-bd971b009
#AI #ChatGPT #EthicalAI #AIEthics #MechanicalTurk

Via @arnokuipers 🙏

All these tech worker layoffs at the same time at ChatGPT just *happens* to get a lot better at answering tech questions. Coincidence?! 😂 #mechanicalturk #conspiracy

@acousticmirror
Yes, the reference to the Mechanical Turk has occurred to me, too. (Except this time you can conceal the laptop in a much smaller space than would fit a chess-playing human dwarf.)
:)
#MechanicalTurk

#AI #ChatGPT #GenerativeAI #MechanicalTurk: "Amazon Mechanical Turk already hides us, the data workers, from the requesters who have us sort, classify, label, and judge their data. Requesters often blame us when something goes wrong, thinking we must be bots or “low skill” rather than looking at the design of their own tasks. We worry studies like these encourage AI requesters who typically post work to MTurk to think about automating without understanding how to generate high quality results, impacting the quality of data and AI we all get. We worry that studies like these focus on us as costs to be cut rather than people with skills and knowledge we bring to the process.

Language is a living, breathing thing. A computer program doesn’t go out into the world to fact-check what it scraped off the internet. Similarly, ChatGPT might generate text, but a human still has to read it to decide if it is “good” text. With all the hype about ChatGPT replacing writers, data annotators, and artists, we have to remember that writing and knowing is not just making words or assigning categories, it’s about judgment."

https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/04/04/issue-5/

The digital sweatshops are disguised as the work of "algorithms" or "AI". We don't get to see the human worker behind the Mechanical Turk, so that we will assume the work is being done by computers, and we won't think about the workers' labour conditions.

#labour #WorkersRights #SweatShopLabour #MechanicalTurk

#Amazon #MechanicalTurk Decent article on the life of the foreign tech workers whom are low paid, and overworked for western companies' benefit.

AI boom is dream and nightmare for workers in Global South | Context https://www.context.news/ai/ai-boom-is-dream-and-nightmare-for-workers-in-global-south

"Humans are adept at OBJECTNAV. Prior work [1] collected a large-scale dataset of 80k human demonstrations [2894 Hrs for $50k] for OBJECTNAV, where human subjects on #MechanicalTurk teleoperated virtual robots & searched for objects in novel houses."

#Mturk #AI #ObjectNav #PreTraining #Gigwork

#Open Access

https://www.semanticscholar.org/reader/71dd4cb05260b008de9d3fb0fb6aee9892b9959c

Oh hey, it's our old friend #MechanicalTurk...

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

Spent about five years doing #MechanicalTurk tasks when it launched, alongside all the other jobs I was doing. In part, I was desperate for the tiny payments, but also because it clearly showed where the bulk of the internet comes from.

Then, it was tags, reviews, keywords. There were so many types of tiny, mindnumbing tasks, and precious little quality control.

The idea that the internet and digital spaces exist simply because "machines" remains so prevalent, in spite of all the human facts.

#amazon #mechanicalturk
https://www.mturk.com/
Hier könnt Ihr sog. Gigworker für einen Apfel und ein Ei anheuern. Sie sind nicht versichert, meist aus ärmeren Ländern und bekommen mit Sicherheit keinen Mindestlohn.
„Mechanical Turk berechnet Kunden eine Gebühr, die sich auf 25 bis 40 Prozent der den Beschäftigten gezahlten Vergütung beläuft.“
Wenn 1-2 Kunden eine schlechte Bewertung abgeben, ist es vorbei mit Aufträgen.

@thefirstred

"With approximately 15,000 articles published on MTurk in the first 6 months of 2022 alone, the ripple effects of bad MTurk data are enormous: failure to find replications, erroneous effects, lines of research based on false information."

"Too Good to Be True: Bots and Bad Data From Mechanical Turk" by Margaret A. Webb and June P. Tangney 2022 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916221120027

#MTurk #MechanicalTurk #science #ciència

Wow. The #MechanicalTurk UI is a disaster.