It's a shame. Mechanical Turk works better than any AI.
xandrius•Jul 6, 2026
It's still AI, just a different type.
CodesInChaos•Jul 6, 2026
The Actually Indian kind?
mghackerlady•Jul 6, 2026
Hey, maybe they're Indonesian!
pwython•Jul 6, 2026
I thought they were Turkish.
expedition32•Jul 6, 2026
Ever been to Singapore? Their apartments have a room for a Indonesian maid.
Never underestimate just how cheap human life is!
shshsjsj•Jul 6, 2026
mild racism, needs to be reported
aswegs8•Jul 6, 2026
It's a joke
Faaak•Jul 6, 2026
you can call the police
HoldOnAMinute•Jul 6, 2026
India is not a race, therefore this is not racist.
testuser1984•Jul 6, 2026
American Idiot kind
brokensegue•Jul 6, 2026
personally, i've never had good luck with MT's quality.
nullsmack•Jul 6, 2026
I had no idea this was still around.
It helped me buy a Battlefield 2 "Special Forces" expansion pack back in the day.
Well, I could've bought it either way but buying it didn't impact my normal income because I did Mechanical Turk in my free time enough to get it.
CodesInChaos•Jul 6, 2026
> In a snake-eating-its-own-tail irony, a 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform were using large language models to complete their tasks,
I assume AI use by workers has risen to the point where it renders Mechanical Turk pointless.
moralestapia•Jul 6, 2026
Yeah, I was doing this kind of Artificial Artificial Artificial Intelligence back in 2012 to make some extra $$$. Glad they finally "patched" that hole ^^.
pc86•Jul 6, 2026
You were using LLMs in 2012?
simlevesque•Jul 6, 2026
They were faking artificial intelligence by using real individuals.
pixel_popping•Jul 6, 2026
Fiverr-5.5 was the leading model back then.
moralestapia•Jul 6, 2026
Not LLMs. (Useful) LLMs came to the market around 2022.
subarctic•Jul 6, 2026
Artificial AI = stuff like mechanical turk where they get humans to do stuff computers can't do and make it look like it's "AI"
Artificial Artificial Intelligence = using computers to do mechanical turk jobs
moralestapia•Jul 6, 2026
You wrote the same thing twice, hehe.
But the point gets across.
skt5•Jul 6, 2026
This likely means those consuming the outputs of Mechanical Turk don't have a good way to measure the value (aka quality) of the outputs.
If they did - then they shouldn't care whether it's a human or a LLM. And if it's a LLM - then the cost will roughly correlate to the MIN(cost of the LLM, cost of a human) to do the task.
AndrewOMartin•Jul 6, 2026
I think the "state of the art" of measuring the quality of outputs was to send the same task to multiple "agents" and only accept answers if over a certain amount agree. With some human review and reputation scoring sprinkled on top. It was a while since I was in this field though
baggachipz•Jul 6, 2026
They moved all the Mechanical Turk workers over to robot and autotaxi piloting.
teddyh•Jul 6, 2026
And monitoring of “cashier-free” grocery stores.
root-parent•Jul 6, 2026
I can see a high value startup, that will provide Human Intelligence with real Humans, locked in the room, with no network, books, LLMs and monitored 24x7 with cameras.
HoldOnAMinute•Jul 6, 2026
Please enjoy each task equally
mcmcmc•Jul 6, 2026
24/7 isolation with no stimulation outside of work? Wonder if the hallucination rate would be higher or lower
obblekk•Jul 6, 2026
Maybe the most unambiguous "ai will automate work" example I've seen yet.
Absolutely does not imply the workers are automated since they can now use the current models to do more complex tasks at the vast number of new AI training data startups.
Turk was simply not designed for greater complexity tasks and so much of their lunch has been eaten by startups specifically built to collect AI training data.
leohonexus•Jul 6, 2026
Where do I find participants for my user studies then?
7 Comments
Never underestimate just how cheap human life is!
It helped me buy a Battlefield 2 "Special Forces" expansion pack back in the day.
Well, I could've bought it either way but buying it didn't impact my normal income because I did Mechanical Turk in my free time enough to get it.
I assume AI use by workers has risen to the point where it renders Mechanical Turk pointless.
Artificial Artificial Intelligence = using computers to do mechanical turk jobs
But the point gets across.
If they did - then they shouldn't care whether it's a human or a LLM. And if it's a LLM - then the cost will roughly correlate to the MIN(cost of the LLM, cost of a human) to do the task.
Absolutely does not imply the workers are automated since they can now use the current models to do more complex tasks at the vast number of new AI training data startups.
Turk was simply not designed for greater complexity tasks and so much of their lunch has been eaten by startups specifically built to collect AI training data.