Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers Have Had Enough

When Manish Bhatia began working on Amazon Mechanical Turk as a side gig in 2010, he was surprised to find himself completely fascinated by the work. Contrary to frequent coverage depicting the piece-work platform as a digital sweatshop offering low-skill tasks, he thought the microtasks were intellectually stimulating. Many involved training machine-learning algorithms to do things like make purchasing recommendations based on past behavior or categorize content by genre; Bhatia enjoyed thinking of himself as the "AI behind the AI" and knowing that he was doing something to shape the future. The only problem was that he wasn't getting paid. Miranda Katz is an associate editor at Backchannel.