And now they’re fucking with psychological research. Chris Stokel-Walker reports for NewScientist (18 August 2018, paywall):
AN ARMY of bots has infiltrated crowdsourcing.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a crowdworking platform that pays people small sums to take part in menial tasks, such as tagging photos or filling out forms. Essentially it is a way to get humans to perform robotic jobs that machines can’t yet manage. But now bots are starting to take on the tasks themselves.
That is a problem, because the platform is widely used by scientists as a cheap way to carry out research. Hui Bai, a social psychologist at the University of Minnesota, was using it to collect data on the perception of far-right movements when he noticed a massive spike in support for groups including the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi party.
Digging deeper into the data, he discovered a number of responses to open-ended questions within his survey didn’t have any connection to the question. Instead, they simply said “Very good” or “Very nice”. Bai also found that around half of his sample of 578 responders had the same GPS location as someone else. Around 50 were supposedly logging on from a statue in Buffalo, New York. A handful of others appeared to have taken the survey in the middle of a lake in Kansas.
And so much for using the Mechanical Turk for psychological research. It’s a little like a lake that’s been invaded by a red algae bloom. It’s unusable until it’s cleaned up.
However, Mechanical Turk was not created to facilitate psychological research, it was merely happy coincidence. It’s too bad if psychological researchers let themselves get dependent on it as a source of data, and in fact that might have been a mistake. As an element of the cyber-world, letting Mechanical Turk continue to evolve is an interesting experiment in the quasi-evolutionary world of digital entities, and I’d rather see how the interaction between bots and the rest of the digital world continues in the Mechanical Turk realm.
