Micro-gigs

September 23, 2024 7:21 AM

Increasingly I’m seeing options to perform small tasks for small amounts of money, well under a dollar, such as answering survey questions or even just what you’d call icebreakers. I would like a money, but I’m sure this is for training AI in some way, and I won’t if I can avoid it. Can you explain what it does?
posted by Countess Elena to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Where are you seeing these options? Can you give more context to this question for people who are not experiencing this?
posted by twelve cent archie at 7:24 AM on September 23

I regularly play a gacha game. If I "check in" with the game online every day, I obtain a small reward. The game, in other words, is training me in a behavior. AI may be involved, but it might just be a method for conditioning folks to respond rather than skip the behavior.
posted by SPrintF at 7:42 AM on September 23

Response by poster: Tasks on Listiller are one example, but it’s not the only one I’ve seen. It’s not Mechanical Turk I’m thinking of
posted by Countess Elena at 7:45 AM on September 23

I think it's really going to be case-by-case. I see this all the time in my own professional context, where it is part of legitimate scientific research. For example, before a researcher does a study, she may want to get a baseline idea of how people tend to respond to certain images, words, questions she intends to use in the study, so she may go out and pay a few dozen people a small amount of money to answer some questions or rate some possible experimental stimuli, to help her ensure that the final ones she uses in her study are actually doing what she wants them to do. (For one example, let's say our hypothetical researcher wants to use two types of pictures in her study - ones that make people feel happy, and ones that make them feel sad. It may be worth her time to pay twenty people a dollar each to look at her pool of possible images and help her pick the ones that get the strongest reactions in each direction.) Where I work, there's a requirement to pay people minimum wage for this kind of work - but even so, if the task is quick enough, that sometimes comes out very cheap. People use a lot of platforms for this, not just mTurk.

But yes, I'm sure for a lot of other people you're helping to build their dataset for some AI nonsense you might or might not approve of. And it might not be easy to tell the difference.
posted by Stacey at 7:53 AM on September 23 [2 favorites]

If you're seeing these as part of a "work from home in minutes a day!" thing, or on Reddit's 'beermoney' subreddit: the pennies you get answering surveys are a fraction of the profit they get selling your information. The "answering questions" are things like "have you shopped at these retailers in the past six months?" or "are you aware of product X?" or "have you seen a commercial for product X in the past week?" and you have to answer hundreds of these questions to reach the "thank you we've credited your account" point.

But the only results are that you are going to get a LOT of sketchy spam for the retailers and products you identify in the long and confusing surveys, and like not directly from the manufacturer of a product but some sketchy online retailer using the product's logo to try and get you to buy it from them in a way that might actually steal your credit card. My spam box is full of these, and the way I know it's related to the surveys is I remember specifically marking the retailers/products in question.

And getting paid out of made convoluted and confusing, even if you can reach a payout threshold.

On seeing your response: I do not know who Listiller is or have any experience with them -- but who's still doing blogs that are paying for guest posts? It may not be sketchy but I'm not sure the money is there.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:54 AM on September 23 [3 favorites]

Scanning Listiller, those look very similar to the marketing surveys we used to get pestered with at the mall.

At this point I would guess that every marketing firm in the world is either using AI or claiming to, so in that sense you are feeding an AI. The data doesn’t look like anything new though. If you wouldn’t fill out a marketing survey in the mall, then don’t fill out one of those.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:52 AM on September 23

I'm mostly familiar with these types of sites as someone who recruits folks to participate in research.

Amazon Mechanical Turk (aka MTurk) used to be the big one. Here's a New York Times article and a Daily Dot article about the experience of working as a "Turker".

Prolific (formerly Prolific Academic) is another site that I've used as a researcher. It focuses on academic research tasks and surveys.
posted by forkisbetter at 10:32 AM on September 23 [1 favorite]