• The Menemen!@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Being a Turk myself: what do I have to do, to get my money?

    After looking into this: is this name racist?

      • Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        The machine consisted of a life-sized model of a human head and torso, with a black beard and grey eyes,[6] and dressed in Ottoman robes and a turban—“the traditional costume”, according to journalist and author Tom Standage, “of an oriental sorcerer”. Its left arm held a long Ottoman smoking pipe while at rest, while its right lay on the top of a large cabinet

        So, I mean, as a reference to the historical device perhaps not racist but the origin of the name is probably kinda racist.

      • Lmaydev
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        9 months ago

        It’s actually a pretty accurate and slightly clever name haha

  • BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Amazon Turk pays like trash too. Though, if you have a favorable currency conversion ratio, might not be bad for you.

    Looked into it a few years ago to see if I could use it for some extra spending money when I was bored. Wasn’t worth it.

    • jeffw@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Go back a decade and it was a little better. I used some scripts that optimized things, along with the Turkopticon community this article mentions and a subreddit for high paying tasks.

    • Evil_incarnate@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      Yeah, I played with it a couple of times to see what it was like. I now have about eighty cents in us currency sitting in my PayPal. Woo.

        • Lmaydev
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          9 months ago

          They’re mainly used to train AI so that would be a bad move

          • circuitfarmer@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Many companies are using AI to generate AI training data. Most of them are data brokers where the margins are becoming razor thin. It’s totally a bad idea, but it is definitely happening.

  • Altima NEO@lemmy.zip
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    9 months ago

    What’s a turker? I’ve never heard that term before, aside from final fantasy viii.

    • BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Amazon has a service called Mechanical Turk. Businesses put up listings for small jobs and random people complete the small jobs for a set amount of money. The jobs are things like ‘transcribe this lecture’ or ‘fill out this survey’. The goal is to connect small jobs with low-skill workers.

      Some of the tasks are more involved than that and require proof of knowledge. But, that is the gist.

    • elmicha@feddit.de
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      9 months ago

      If you can’t guess it, you could read the first sentence of the article.

      • ABCDE@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        “A workers rights group for Mechanical Turk workers says that at least dozens of MTurk workers have been suddenly locked out of the Amazon-owned microlabor platform, suggesting a widespread issue that is denying these people the ability to work and in some cases denying them access to money they have already made on the platform.”

        Yea, that really helped (it didn’t).

      • ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        Read the first paragraphs of the article (till the paywall), still have no clue what a “turk” is.

        Maybe I’m just dense.

        • Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Amazon Mechanical Turk is a service where people can do simple tasks for small amounts of money. Usually things you would expect to be automated, especially in this day and age. I did it for a bit about a decade or so ago. Things like small amounts of proofreading, transcription, etc.

          The name is a reference to a hoax device made in the late 1700s that was supposedly a chess playing automaton. In actuality it was operated by a person hiding within. It was nicknamed the Mechanical Turk because it had a model of the head and torso of a person dressed in Ottoman robes, etc.