Outlining Boats
Words by workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk
Images: Milly Darby
Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) = Paid tasks
Requester = Employer
Turker = someone who works on Amazon Mechanical Turk
I once did a survey that required me to watch porn. It is not uncommon to come across “adult content” in HITs, but this particular survey had me watch a 5 minute porn video and then comment on how I felt afterwards.
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My worst job was a heavily attention focused HIT which involved a lot of flashing lights, discerning barely visible numbers and required constant diligence for about an hour. I hated that HIT, but it paid well. There was maybe one break, then back to this straining, overly tense HIT. I had to take a break once it was over.
A while back I had to do a hit on how I felt reading specific sentences, and evaluate them on certain factors. These seemed like AI generated scenarios that just didn’t make much sense, such as “How useful is a person who sees the future but forgets it and turns into a pillow for an hour each night? How does this make you feel?”
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The worst job I’ve done was to evaluate very disturbing pictures. The pictures were of mutilated bodies, slums, kids that had been hurt, animals that had been hurt. I can look at a lot of things but those pictures messed me up for a big part of my day.
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The worst job I’ve ever done was an hour long Inquisit hit in which I had to look at images and categorize them into two separate categories. There was no counter or progress bar, I had never been told how many images to expect and it literally just felt never ending. Every time I thought it was over there were just more and more and more. It was very poorly paid too and it really made me question what I was doing with my life and if my precious time is really worth this.
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I was asked to record a video of myself pouring syrup all over myself and lying down on the bathroom floor.
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A survey had a writing task where you could not use certain letters to write your response. The letters forbidden were very common ones like E and T. There was a minimum length requirement and I could not complete that HIT in enough time so it expired on me.
Taking a photo of my feet by far was the weirdest hit I have ever done. It wasn’t uncomfortable it was more odd than anything else.
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The strangest job I did was outlining boats. I have no idea what they were doing with the info but they paid well.
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A Transcription hit it paid $100 for a transcribing a two minute video. That by far is the best hit I ever accepted on Mturk. In five minutes I hit my daily Mturk goal that was an amazing hit.
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The strangest job I’ve ever done on mTurk probably had to be a survey that was asking me about my penis size.
The worst job I’ve ever done on mTurk was probably one that included an endless 250+ pages full of sliders. It involved rating several hundred people on various traits just based off of one picture of them. The worse part was that the pay was abysmal. However, I was so far into the task when I realized that the pay would be bad that I did not want to back out without finishing it.
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One time I had to record myself snoring.
