A new paper from researchers at Swiss university EPFL suggests that between 33% and 46% of distributed crowd workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service appear to have “cheated” when performing a particular task assigned to them, as they used tools such as ChatGPT to do some of the work. If that practice is widespread, it may turn out to be a pretty serious issue.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has long been a refuge for frustrated developers who want to get work done by humans. In a nutshell, it’s an application programming interface (API) that feeds tasks to humans, who do them and then return the results. These tasks are usually the kind that you wish computers would be better at. Per Amazon, an example of such tasks would be: “Drawing bounding boxes to build high-q …
