I just learned about Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, which they call "artificial artificial intelligence." Programmers use an MTurk API, which pays people pennies to do "simple tasks that people do better than computers."

HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task. These are tasks that people are willing to pay you to complete. For example a HIT might ask: "Is there a pizza parlour in this photograph?" Typically these tasks are extraordinarily difficult for computers, but simple for humans to answer.

Am I the only person whose first thought was, "This is just dying to be exploited by a sweatshop owner in a third world country"?


Just so you know, the best deal right now appears to be that you can be paid two cents to draw a sheep.

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