Mechanical Turk and 12,000 drawings of sheep facing left

by Katharine Mieszkowski

***

Curtis Taylor, 50, a corporate trainer in Clarksville, Ind., who has earned more than $345 on Mturk.com, doesn’t even think of turking as work. To him, it’s a way to kill time. “I’m not in it to make money, I’m in it to goof off,” he says. Taylor travels a lot for business and finds himself sitting around in hotel rooms at night. He doesn’t like to watch TV much, and says that turking beats playing free online poker. To him, it’s “mad money,” which he blows buying gifts on Amazon, like Bill Bennett’s “America, the Last Best Hope,” for his son, a junior in high school. “If I ever stop being entertained, I’ll stop doing it,” he says. “I’ll just quit.”

Yet what’s a happy diversion for Taylor is serious business for the companies on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Efficient Frontier, a search engine marketing firm, has used Mturk.com to accomplish tens of thousands of tasks since early 2006. Efficient Frontier helps companies figure out which keywords will bring Web surfers to their sites. With Mturk.com, Efficient Frontier can afford to pay three different people to look at each potential keyword, and vote whether those words are relevant to a given site. It costs the company just 4.5 cents to test each keyword, paying 1.5 cents to Amazon, and 1 cent each to three turkers.

Sherwood Stranieri of SkyPromote, another search engine marketing firm in Boston, says he now has a virtual staff of 120 workers on Mturk.com. “It’s like a giant human computer,” he says. “It’s like having an infinite attention span.” Stranieri pays qualified turkers to surf a Web directory and figure out exactly where a specific site should be listed. He can get 300 of these tasks done in just five or six hours, even if he posts them on Mturk.com in the middle of the night. He pays 5 cents a task. “Pricing is very low right now because there are so many more workers than tasks right now,” he says. “People are fishing around for work to do.” Why do people do it if the pay is so low? It’s a question Stranieri wonders about himself. “I think it’s something of a hybrid between trying to make money on the side and a diversion, a substitute for doing a crossword puzzle. It’s sort of a mental exercise.”

Eric Cranston, 18, who recently graduated from high school, got into turking because at the time he didn’t have anything better to do. “When it came out,” he says, “I had just broken my foot, so I was just at home doing nothing on the computer. So, why not?” He’s used the money he’s made answering survey questions and transcribing podcasts to buy a game controller and a computer monitor. He recently transferred $200 to his bank account. “I don’t think anyone could actually make a living off of Mturk. There isn’t enough work,” Cranston says. He is one turker, however, who is plotting how to move up the food chain. Currently, Cranston and a friend are working to launch a Web-based business altering photographs, called Image Den, using, naturally, Mechanical Turkers to treat the images.

In its earliest days, someone posted a request on Amazon Mechanical Turk, offering to pay 2 cents for a drawing of a sheep facing left. Peter Cohen, director of Amazon Mechanical Turk, says the company was “puzzled by” the request. The requester was Aaron Koblin, a student in UCLA’s Design/Media Arts program, who was writing his master’s thesis about the site. He was intrigued by Amazon’s effort to “establish a framework for the utilization of people as computers,” as he wrote in his thesis. “My project was very tongue-in-cheek,” he tells me. “On the one hand, it’s using the system the way it’s meant to be used. On the other hand, it’s asking them to do this ridiculous thing.”

The grad student invited turkers to draw up to five sheep at the rate of 2 cents apiece. Over 40 days and 40 nights, the sheep flooded in at a rate of 11 per hour. By the end, 7,599 turkers had participated. He collected 12,000 sheep and promptly put 10,000 of them up for sale at the rate of $20 for 20 sheep at the Sheep Market. This caused some consternation among the people who had drawn them. “They’re selling our sheep!!!” wailed one poster on a turker message board. Another wrote: “Does anyone remember signing over the rights to the drawings?” In fact, they had. To participate in Amazon Mechanical Turk, workers, in the legalese of the site, “agree that the work product of any Services you perform is deemed a ‘work made for hire’ for the benefit of the Requester, and all ownership rights, including worldwide intellectual property rights, will vest with the Requester immediately upon your performance of the Service.”

Why sheep? Koblin relished all the associations that sheep have from the biblical followers of the good shepherd to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” The term “cottage industry” comes from peasants’ setting up shop at home, when it wasn’t planting or harvesting season, often spinning wool. “The cottage industry, which would employ entire families from their houses, has notable similarities to Mechanical Turk, such as employing people for spare time, working from home, and relative anonymity,” he wrote in his thesis.

Koblin wanted his project to capture the creativity expressed by turkers, while drawing attention to the insignificant role each of them played in the process. He certainly succeeded in capturing their creativity. Even after he stopped accepting sheep, and started selling them by the lot on the Internet, more people wrote to him wanting to contribute sheep for free. They just wanted to see their sheep join the herd. “Most of these people clearly weren’t in it for the money,” Koblin says. “They weren’t doing it so they could get 2 cents. It was more about participating in something larger.”

Maybe so. But maybe the ultimate message is: Congrats, fellow humans, we’re not obsolete! The machines, they still need us! Only at a very sheepish price