Mechanical Turk Workers Utilize AI to Mimic Human Behavior

Mechanical Turk, a service by Amazon that allows users to divide simple tasks into small sub-tasks and pay a few pennies for each completed task, is now being used by nearly half of its workers who are using artificial intelligence (AI) to do tasks that were intended for humans. Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne found that 33-46% of crowd workers used large language models (LLMs) to complete tasks on Mechanical Turk. Tasks such as identifying the sentiment of a sentence, drawing a circle around a cat on an image, and abstract summarization are particularly suited to surreptitious automation. While the use of AI in Mechanical Turk does not come as a surprise — some level of automation has likely existed since the platform’s early days — this new development raises the concern that there is a crisis of AI training on AI-generated data. Researchers caution that platforms, researchers, and crowd workers should find new ways to ensure that human data remains human.