WHEN it appeared on Mechanical Turk, an outsourcing website run by Amazon, Boris Smus's request looked unremarkable. He wanted people to search the web and gather a few facts about New York City. Workers snapped up the tasks and answers rolled in within minutes. Quick to complete and requiring no specialist skills, it was typical of work available on the site, which usually pays a few cents per task.
There was, however, something unusual about the job. It was not posted by Smus, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but by software he had created. The same software also posted editing and writing jobs. As the results came in, it farmed the text back out for further checking and editing. The result was an encyclopedia entry on New York ...
No comments:
Post a Comment