{"id":3211,"date":"2023-06-27T09:51:01","date_gmt":"2023-06-27T09:51:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/?p=3211"},"modified":"2023-06-27T09:53:05","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T09:53:05","slug":"newsletter-28-may-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/?p=3211","title":{"rendered":"Newsletter 28 – May 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
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Next Open Forum<\/b><\/span><\/h1>\n

If you have thoughts on Turkopticon\u2019s mass rejection campaign or any other issues facing turkers, we would like to invite you to our open community forum on Wednesday May 31st. Turkers can stop by between the hours of 1-3 pm EST. As always, we will try to answer questions about the platform itself, turker tools and forums, how to get started on AMT, and more. Please fill out the registration form at the link below and we will provide the Zoom link. Camera use is optional. Feel free to come for 2 minutes or the full 2 hours. We look forward to chatting with you all next week!<\/p>\n

Signup at\u00a0https:\/\/turkopticon.net\/open-forum<\/a>.
\nIf you want to learn more or have questions, please email us at\u00a0moderation@turkopticon.net<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n
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We are the foundation of AI models!<\/b><\/span><\/h1>\n

By Krystal Kauffman<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n
What is the emotion expressed in the following sentence?
\nMark dropped his ice cream cone and began to cry.<\/p>\n
    \n
  1. Happiness<\/li>\n
  2. Sadness<\/li>\n
  3. Anger<\/li>\n
  4. Indifference<\/li>\n
  5. Regret<\/li>\n
  6. Frustration<\/li>\n
  7. Joyful<\/li>\n
  8. Excitement<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Clearly, the answer is 2. Of course he is sad! Unless he is crying because he is frustrated. Maybe he is crying because he regrets dropping the ice cream? Well, he could also be crying out of anger.<\/p>\n

    I\u2019m one of the people sitting behind a computer, completing tasks on Amazon\u2019s Mechanical Turk (AMT)\u00a0\u00a0Crowdsource Platform<\/a>\u00a0and I see tasks that look like the one above often. By the time I finished contemplating the \u201csimple question\u201d I had spent 1-2 minutes reading and rereading. After completing 100 tasks, my efforts netted me $3.00 and cost me nearly two hours of my time.<\/p>\n

    Would it surprise you to learn that I help program the smart devices you use in your daily life? I work on a crowdsourcing platform Amazon created to power AI. Amazon dabbles in many things. While the general public is familiar with Alexa, Prime Video, Audible, and so on, many people have not heard of\u00a0Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT)<\/a>. In its simplest form, it is a crowdsourcing platform in which requesters approved by Amazon, often data scientists and AI researchers, place microwork on AMT to be completed. Workers known as Turkers choose tasks and complete them for money.<\/p>\n

    As of 2019, there were\u00a0250,810<\/a>\u00a0of us who had completed at least one task on AMT. I am certainly not saying each one of those turkers completed tasks related to machine learning (ML) and large language models (LLMs). Amazon did begin to market Turkers in 2017 with a\u00a0tutorial on crowdsourcing ML training data<\/a>, however.<\/p>\n

    With big tech companies throwing everything into the \u201cGreat AI Race,\u201d it wasn\u2019t long before Amazon\u00a0introduced Titan<\/a>\u00a0to compete with ChatGPT and Bard. Was anyone surprised?<\/p>\n

    Being the curious person I am, I clicked around on Amazon\u2019s website to read more about Titan. I took notice of what the bottom of the page said in large print:<\/p>\n

    \u201cAI and ML have been a focus for Amazon for over 20 years, and many of the capabilities customers use with Amazon are driven by ML. We have thousands of engineers at Amazon committed to ML, and it\u2019s a big part of our heritage, current ethos, and future. Amazon Titan models are built by leveraging Amazon\u2019s decades of experience to make ML accessible to anyone who wants to use it.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Coincidentally, AMT, founded in 2005, was ripe with batches of work asking users to analyze sentiments, flag hate speech, annotate data, and more. While \u201cthousands of engineers at Amazon [are] committed to ML,\u201d thousands of underpaid and unrepresented workers have performed tasks over the last 18 years on the AMT platform to build the products you are now being introduced to.<\/p>\n

    Jassy is likely right. I am certain it does take billions of dollars to train \u2018really good AI models.\u201d\u00a0 That seems like a great reason for a company to build a crowd-work platform. Amazon could use its product to build its two LLMs that are marketed as Titan and make a small profit off of other companies needing to harness the \u201cpower of the crowd,\u201d as crowdwork is so often referenced. The crowdwork model was, of course, designed to save companies money and deliver quick results. I imagine that Jassy and Amazon saved billions more by having turkers around the world complete the tasks necessary to build Titan at a MUCH lower rate of pay than they would be required to pay their employees. Yet, it should be noted that even though AMT workers are the backbone of these products, Amazon does little to recognize their efforts or fix even the simplest of problems.<\/p>\n

    On August 19, 2022, one of the requesters approved by Amazon to list work posted a very large batch of work. Many turkers completed at least a couple of the tasks. Some turkers completed a couple hundred (or more.) As soon as the worker submitted the tasks, they came back rejected. The impact was huge! The workers lost pay and lost time. Worse than that, worker approval ratings took a negative hit with each rejection. Some workers lost their ability to qualify for work on the platform. What did these workers do to deserve this?<\/p>\n

    Nothing.<\/p>\n

    The workers did nothing to deserve this. The requester made an error in their coding, took the data they did generate, rejected all of the work, and disappeared. What the requester did was against the\u00a0AMT Terms of Service<\/a>. It would seem that Amazon would surely make this right for the workers\u2026right? It is worth mentioning again that Amazon\u2019s smart products wouldn\u2019t function without the turkers. It actually would seem that this means nothing because Amazon won\u2019t even go into their system and manually override the rejections or restore the approval ratings to their previous number. They do not care that workers lost time, money, or even the ability to do work on the platform in some cases.\u00a0Turkopticon<\/a>\u00a0and supporters have asked for this situation to be corrected by Amazon. Turkers have spoken up, asking Amazon to fix this mess that happened on their platform. We are not a product. We are humans working on AI whether companies like Amazon want to recognize that or not. The above article about the \u2018really good expensive AI models\u2019 has an important piece that I would wager is being overlooked by many, although I\u2019m sure not intentionally. This isn\u2019t the flashy part but it does, in fact, speak to Amazon\u2019s ethos as they state on their website:<\/p>\n

    “Sivasubramanian and Saha declined to talk about the size of the Titan models or identify the data Amazon used to train them, and Saha would not describe the process Amazon followed to remove problematic parts of the model training data.”<\/p>\n

    We know those answers.<\/p>\n

    There are many responses from PR regarding these things and I expect we\u2019ll be seeing them again very soon. I have just one request: please see the workers.<\/p>\n

    Amazon, you can do better.\u00a0<\/b><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n
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    Turkopticon is looking for suggestions!<\/b><\/span><\/h1>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n
     <\/p>\n

    Do you have suggestions for how to make Turkopticon better and would like to share them with us?<\/p>\n

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    Please email\u00a0volunteercoms@turkopticon.net<\/a>\u00a0and someone will be in contact to further hear about your suggestions and see how we all can work together to make Turk better for all of us.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Even if you think your ideas are ones we should know please don\u2019t be afraid to send them our way because we listen to all suggestions and want everyone to be heard!<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Next Open Forum If you have thoughts on Turkopticon\u2019s mass rejection campaign or any other issues facing turkers, we would like to invite you to our open community forum on Wednesday May 31st. Turkers can stop by between the hours of 1-3 pm EST. As always, we will try to answer questions about the platform … <\/p>\n

    Continue reading “Newsletter 28 – May 2023”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsletters","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3211"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3217,"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211\/revisions\/3217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}