Can Museums afford the real cost of the gig economy?
We are increasingly hearing about the ‘Gig Economy’ — the growing trend for individuals to sell their services to others via a shared platform. The rates are flexible and often charged by the minute, by the hour or as a single set price for a one-off job. Although we mostly associate this concept with Uber or Airbnb, but I am interested in sites such as Fivver, Upwork and Freelancer — platforms that allow us to quickly contact and hire specialists for one-off jobs.
After exploring the potential of the various AI platforms, I decided this would be a good test of the gig economy. Could I find someone who could quickly write a script that would run our images through the Microsoft Vision API (as described in this post)? The script would need to grab the top tags and the caption and then create a CSV that could be imported into our source system. I wanted to test affordability for a sector that often operates on a tight budget. I wanted to spend just $10.
For my museum, this project promised to tick a few strategic boxes.
- Embrace the changes brought about by the digital revolution — keep pace with the new work environment.
- Reduce costs - pay only for the actual work required.
- Giving us access to a global pool of expertise which can turnaround work quickly churn.
For this pilot project above, it took under an hour for us to find someone. They charged $10 to write the required script which would run over the first 5,000 images processed and make them ready to load into our database. This ‘job’ proved to be a simple task for the Fivver contractor where it would have taken us hours to get the whole thing working.
Now the data was ready to import, but it still required some form of quality control — we have seen in other posts how inaccurate computer vision can be. Fivver didn't seem like the right place for this type of outsourced quality control work, but after a quick google search I found Amazon Mechanical Turk.
The Mechanical Turk has been around since 2005, it allows users to post simple jobs (known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs)) to the site. Each task pays on average between $0.01 and $0.10 — the site works on the principle of one user repeating thousands of simple tasks to make money. This seemed ideal — the task would be to confirm if the caption matched the image, a simple yes/no. We would take all the yes’ and publish them, the no’s would go back into the pile for cataloguing by a staff member.
Before I uploaded the work, I jumped in and decided to complete some HITs myself to see how the process worked. In the example I was given, I was offered $0.08 for 20 lines of OCR work. At that rate I would need to complete around 4,000 lines an hour to meet the NZ minimum wage — I tried and failed, 100 lines in and $0.40c in the bank I stopped. It seemed an unbalanced effort for minimum reward. I’m not the only one who has a problem with this, a quick Google highlights the unsavoury side of the micro gig economy.
As I was reading these articles I couldn't help but think of the role museums play in society and in particular the Code of Ethics that we abide by:
Members of the museum profession should observe accepted standards and laws and uphold the dignity and honour of their profession. They should safeguard the public against illegal or unethical professional conduct.”
ICOM Code of Ethics 8.
At this stage, we have decided to continue working with sites such as Fivver, as the user can set their own price and terms. But we won’t be using micro-gigs. Solving the backlog and opening the collections is important, but more so is paying a fair price for the work that we want.
