2.1 Instructions
The participation agreement for Amazon Mechanical Turk workers includes the following clause:
(ii) you will use your human intelligence and independent judgment to perform Tasks in a competent and workmanlike manner.
This makes me wonder: how do we even prove to others that we’re not bots but a real person on the other side of the internet? Is there really anything that only a human can do and a bot can’t?
I have thus created a request on MTurk, inviting workers to come up with proofs that they’re human. They are asked to submit a file of something they have created: things that distinguish them from bots, or things that makes them feel human.
Responses from over 900 submissions are selected and edited into short video loops, which are played back in used Microsoft Lumia phones which run the now-obsolete Windows Mobile operating software.
While being seemingly more open-ended and less invasive compared to taking a video of their workspace, this work involves exploitation in another dimension, as it is the creativity of the workers that is being harvested here.
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