--- title: "People Are Using AI to Automate Responses to Site That Pays Them to Train AI" description: "Chasing Tail Much of the believed-to-be-human labor being put into AI systems might not be so human after all. Launched in 2005, Amazon's \"Mechanical Turk\" platform, described on Amazon's website as a \"global, on-demand, 24x7 workforce,\" is a system that, for nearly 20 years, has allowed humans to cash in by performing small-scale AI training […]" date: "2023-06-17" modified: "2023-06-17" authors: - name: "Maggie Harrison Dupré" job_title: "Senior Staff Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/mharrison" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/people-automating-responses-train-ai" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" tags: - "ai" - "ai training" - "Amazon" - "the digest" --- # People Are Using AI to Automate Responses to Site That Pays Them to Train AI ![Droves of Amazon's human "Mechanical Turk" workers are using AI systems to automate the training of AI systems.]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* ## Chasing the Tail Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform, which launched in 2005, has allowed humans to make some money on the side by completing small tasks such as data validation or simple transcriptions that "[require human intelligence]()." The basic idea is to "break down a manual, time-consuming project into smaller, more manageable tasks to be completed by distributed workers over the Internet," in [Amazon's own words](). Unsurprisingly, the platform — named for a supposedly mechanical 18th century chess-playing machine that [actually had a person inside](), controlling it — has [already been used]() to train AI systems as well. Yet with the advent of powerful AI chatbots, the dynamics have started to shift profoundly. As [*TechCrunch* reports](), researchers at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland [have found]() that a significant number of Mechanical Turk workers are already using large language models (LLMs) to automate their labor. "One of our key sources of human data is no longer fully 'human!'" [tweeted]() EFPL PhD candidate Manoel Ribeiro, co-author of a [yet-to-be-peer reviewed paper on the research](). "We estimate that 33-46 percent of crowd workers on MTurk used LLMs in a text production task — which may increase as ChatGPT and the like become more popular and powerful." In other words, humans are using AI systems to automate menial tasks that were originally deemed to be too complex for machines. In [some instances](), that could mean humans are using AI models to train AIs — the latest example of a bizarre [hall of mirrors]() in which AI data is used to train AIs, likely leading to misinformation and chaos. https://twitter.com/manoelribeiro/status/1668986074801098754 ## High-Speed Turkforce On the one hand, as *TechCrunch* notes, this isn't terribly surprising. AI systems have advanced rapidly over the past few years, with powerful tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard increasingly blurring the lines between humans and machines. And Amazon's Mechanical Turk workers are paid — often meagerly — per task. If an LLM-powered tool can expedite those tasks, it's hard to blame them for going the automation route, especially considering there isn't much oversight from Amazon, according to *TechCrunch*. As the researchers note, there are some reasons to be concerned as it becomes more difficult to distinguish between human and AI-generated data. "LLMs are becoming more popular by the day, and multimodal models, supporting not only text, but also image and video input and output, are on the rise," the researchers conclude in their paper. "With this, our results should be considered the 'canary in the coal mine' that should remind platforms, researchers, and crowd workers to find new ways to ensure that human data remain human." **More on AI:** [*Owner of Gaming Sites Fires Writers, Hires for "AI Editor" To Churn out Hundreds of Articles per Week*]() ## Author At Futurism, I've reported extensively on the rise of AI as a cultural and business force shaping the media industry, and more broadly how those dynamics are changing how we all consume and share information and relate to one another. I'm also fascinated by public health policy and ethics, the role of emerging tech in politics and governance — and the powerful people and forces at those intersections — climate change, and the environment. My investigation on Sports Illustrated's use of AI-generated authors with fictional biographies won a 2024 Mirror Award for "Best Story on Media Coverage of Artificial Intelligence in Journalism and the Media" from Syracuse University's SI Newhouse School, I contributed to Niemen Lab's 2025 Predictions for Journalism series, and I've discussed my work for Futurism during appearances on NPR, CNN, the BBC, the CBC, and more. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I played Division I field hockey for the Minutewomen as a midfielder. Since then, I've lived in New Orleans, Louisiana and Manhattan, New York. I spend my free time running, reading, perusing archival fashion, and searching for the world’s best negroni. I also have a debonair tuxedo cat, Westley, who's named after "The Princess Bride." ### Author social links [Bluesky]()