Artificial Artificial Artificial Intelligence in Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Milwaukee.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2009 is David Bello, whose focus is on Amazon's Mechanical Turk system. This is a form of crowdsourcing, which itself combines the outsourcing of labour to an external provider with community-provided open source labour; crowdsourcing thus exhibits an open quality where users are not employed or hired, but simply choose to perform the tasks that they are interested in. In crowdsourcing, the requesting body solicits the general public to join the labouring community.

In the Amazon case, the company provides the platform which mediates the labour process; using this platform, a requesting body can provide tasks which are then performed by the labouring community. Community members are remunerated according to their provision of HITs (human intelligence tasks), which address problems that cannot be done by computers (semantic and cultural understanding, or sensory translation).

But at the same time, within one month of the existence of Mechanical Turk, users had created automation scripts using the Greasemonkey browser extension to perform specific HITs without the need for community members to become active themselves. This was possible itself only because the approval of HITs was often found to be done programmatically by the requesting body - in other words, users reverse-engineered the response patterns of requesting bodies and then wrote scripts to exploit them. This development was enabled by the emergence of external discussion and exchange boards covering and analysing the Mechanical Turk (there were no community or collaboration fora on the Mechanical Turk site itself - here, users and requesting body representatives were entirely invisible to one another).

Outside of the system, then, the rules and constraints of the platform have very little power, so it was possible to engage in tactical programming to subvert the system. This provides an interesting link back to the original mechanical turk, in fact: a supposed chess-playing automaton which became a world-wide phenomenon (it beat both Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin), which was actually operated by a dwarf hidden inside the mechanical turk box. Amazon presumably used this reference because their HITs would desirably have been performed by computer, but couldn't - so contributors take on the role of the dwarf who plays a machine, simulating artificial intelligence.

In turn, then, if what happened here in the end was users utilising artificial intelligence to rort the Mechanical Turk system, what we have here is a computerised simulation of a human simulation of artificial intelligence - to wit, artificial artificial artificial intelligence...

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