MTurk Images
May 2020
Originally commissioned by Derde Wal for Social Aspects #6
Neural network programming by Ibo Ibelings
MTurk Images is a film that explores the micro-tasking platform Amazon Mechanical Turk, where people can do little tasks computers aren't good at yet, and its relation to image recognition software.

For the film several people that work on Mechanical Turk filmed themselves answering questions about the platform, labour, image recognition technologies and more.
The film also includes footage of the creation of a dataset of the city of Nijmegen using Mechanical Turk. It also shows an image recognition algorithm that uses this dataset being tested. The film has an introduction of a montage of YouTube videos explaining what Mechanical Turk is and why it's used for image recognition.

To give the workers a fair payment for their contribution they received $0.14 for each image they described for the dataset and $5 for sending in their video with the answers to the survey.