this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Mechanical Turkis a service that Amazon sells to other companies that are trying to pretend to be AI companies. the whole market is full of people making wild claims aboit their product that aren't true, and them desperately searching for the cheapest labor to actually do it.
I'm not actually a nuclear fission company if i take millions of R&D investment, pay me amd my buddy half of it, and then pay a bunch of crackheads to pour diesel into an electric generator.
After reading through that wiki, that doesn't sound like the sort of thing that would work well for what AI is actually able to do in real-time today.
Contrary to your statement, Amazon isn't selling this as a means to "pretend" to do AI work, and there's no evidence of this on the page you linked.
That's not to say that this couldn't be used to fake an AI, it's just not sold this way, and in many applications it wouldn't be able to compete with the already existing ML models.
Can you link to any examples of companies making wild claims about their product where it's suspected that they are using this service? (I couldn't find any after a quick Google search... but I didn't spend too much time on it).
I'm wondering if the misunderstanding here is based on the sections here related to AI work? The kind of AI work that you would do with Turkers is the kind of work that's necessary to prepare the data for it to be used on training a machine learning model. Things like labelling images, transcribing words from images, or (to put it in a way that most of us have already experienced) solving captchas asking you to find the traffic lights (so that you can help train their self-driving car AI model).