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I want to know who is paying $0.01 USD to get someone to manually transrcibe a reciept to a table. It seems the Mechanical Turk ecconomy could be dwindling due

by gitgud 7y ago

I want to know who is paying $0.01 USD to get someone to manually transrcibe a reciept to a table. It seems the Mechanical Turk ecconomy could be dwindling due to the accessiblity of AI these days.

cameronbrown 7y ago
Well, AI can't handle the edge cases yet. For some businesses it makes more economical sense to invest in Turk for transcription rather than training a ML model, which obviously requires a sizeable investment. Either way, you'll need a decent training set and Turk is great for that.
FluffyKitty 7y ago
Possibly Expensify? There was that news that came out a bit ago that their "SmartScan" actually fell back on Mechanical Turk [1] even though it was sold as a AI-type thing. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/expensify-acknowledges-potential-privacy-problem-by-calling-it-a-feature/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/expen...
- Thorrez 7y ago
  Yep >“Most people’s first mistake is they go on there and accept any task they see,” says Naab. “They’ll do these transcriptions — $0.01 to transcribe a whole receipt for Expensify. That’s a terrible ROI.”
  - jmnicolas 7y ago
    It depends, $0.01 might be worth something in a very poor country. But on the other hand if you have access to a computer a poor country, 1 cent might not be worth your time anyway.
    - mruts 7y ago
      You can use MTurk on phones I assume? Even very poor people often have smartphones and data where I am living (Tanzania).
  - technofiend 7y ago
    It's an investment because the more lucrative jobs require turks have hundreds or thousands of successfully completed tasks. So people will take one penny jobs simply to build credibility.
- baud147258 7y ago
  Perhaps they're transcripting some receipt to compare/check with the result of their AI-type system?
  - giarc 7y ago
    Or the AI system automatically boots it to Mturk when the photo quality is bad for example.
discobot 7y ago
You still need Turk to train your models...
ashelmire 7y ago
The whole point of MTurk is to get data you will use to train your models. Using some artificial means to make money on MTurk would be circular, and probably easily spotted - if not, your model has effectively solved the problem domain anyway! We do language related things on MTurk (crowdsourced translation, for example). It's very easy to spot those who have used something like google translate or other artificial means - it's quite rare for a sentence to be translated exactly the same way twice, for starters.

by gitgud 7y ago

I want to know who is paying $0.01 USD to get someone to manually transrcibe a reciept to a table. It seems the Mechanical Turk ecconomy could be dwindling due to the accessiblity of AI these days.

cameronbrown 7y ago

Well, AI can't handle the edge cases yet. For some businesses it makes more economical sense to invest in Turk for transcription rather than training a ML model, which obviously requires a sizeable investment. Either way, you'll need a decent training set and Turk is great for that.

FluffyKitty 7y ago

Possibly Expensify? There was that news that came out a bit ago that their "SmartScan" actually fell back on Mechanical Turk [1] even though it was sold as a AI-type thing. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/expensify-acknowledges-potential-privacy-problem-by-calling-it-a-feature/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/expen...

Thorrez 7y ago
Yep >“Most people’s first mistake is they go on there and accept any task they see,” says Naab. “They’ll do these transcriptions — $0.01 to transcribe a whole receipt for Expensify. That’s a terrible ROI.”
- jmnicolas 7y ago
  It depends, $0.01 might be worth something in a very poor country. But on the other hand if you have access to a computer a poor country, 1 cent might not be worth your time anyway.
  - mruts 7y ago
    You can use MTurk on phones I assume? Even very poor people often have smartphones and data where I am living (Tanzania).
- technofiend 7y ago
  It's an investment because the more lucrative jobs require turks have hundreds or thousands of successfully completed tasks. So people will take one penny jobs simply to build credibility.
baud147258 7y ago
Perhaps they're transcripting some receipt to compare/check with the result of their AI-type system?
- giarc 7y ago
  Or the AI system automatically boots it to Mturk when the photo quality is bad for example.

discobot 7y ago

You still need Turk to train your models...

ashelmire 7y ago

The whole point of MTurk is to get data you will use to train your models. Using some artificial means to make money on MTurk would be circular, and probably easily spotted - if not, your model has effectively solved the problem domain anyway! We do language related things on MTurk (crowdsourced translation, for example). It's very easy to spot those who have used something like google translate or other artificial means - it's quite rare for a sentence to be translated exactly the same way twice, for starters.