Busy work. We all hate it but somehow it pays off in the end. When I read the article from the New York Times entitled 'Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans,' I was intrigued enough to investigate it on my own. After tons of confusing instructional pages, I was finally registered to complete my own hits. I was able to create my own prepaid HITS on Mechanical Turk, but I have no need for that. I thumbed around for a good twenty minutes before I finally found the list of needed HITS. The first one sounded fun, it was titled 'Make A Drawing.' The entry looked like this:
An image came up and I attempted to recreate it using an online program similar to the most simplistic version of Paint possible. Although I do not understand the point of the program I did, I do understand how it is difficult for a computer to re-create and how pointless it would be for a highly paid executive to perform this task. Although that particular HIT did not make sense, others were a little bit more reasonable. For example. Another HIT asked you to create random questions for a survey page. The link was given and subsequently a topic was given for the random questions.
Mechanical Turk seemed like it would be something that I would enjoy. I really enjoy playing with computers and learning new things on the computer. However, it turned out to be busy work that would never interest me. Although I should have gone through more options, but for some reason I just didn't see the point. For every 15 minutes or so I could earn one whole cent. Ok, well maybe I could even earn 7 cents, but my time is worth more than less than one cent a minute. I think that Mechanical Turk is a good idea but may not be executed correctly. It is definitely smarter to have people do small jobs but I just can't imagine many people doing the tasks voluntarily, especially when they only make a cent for 15 minutes of their time. I am curious of how people are attracted to the site. Busy work has never been fun homework, how can people actually chose to do it at random? While allocating these jobs to the public is a smart idea, I wonder if there is a better way to encourage activity in it. I definitely had never heard of it before I read the article. Have you?
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