Soylent: Mechanical Turk for Microsoft Word

http://futurismic.com/2010/09/29/soylent-is-people-word-processor-plugin-crowdsources-your-editing/

by po • 16 years ago

25 12 16 years ago

futurismic.com

owrange• 16 years ago

i hope it doesn't require any downloading like silverlight

ephermata• 16 years ago

This is wacky beautiful. I look forward to the packaged precompiled plugin so I can try it out myself.

One thing that comes to mind -- it may not be that hard to overwhelm the Mechanical Turk tasks associated with Soylent to reach a situation where I see every single Soylent task from a single document. It's an interesting question to calculate how many people you would need, given the volume of Soylent usage.

The point is that if I control every single worker on your Soylent task, then I can lean a lot about your document. That in turn could lead to exciting conversations with your IT department.

po2• 16 years ago

Yeah this is definitely not for sensitive documents. Users have enough trouble already distinguishing between native and web applications, public and private, etc… Now you need to explain the difference between AI and non-AI computation.

ecaradec2• 16 years ago

It could be very nice for blog posts, and website infos. I'm not a native speaker, I'd love to have an army to fix my mistakes.

judofyr• 16 years ago

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740796

8ren• 16 years ago

I've just been reading A Deepness in the Sky with its focussed zipheads, who provide human-level automation in the the Slow Zone. Only difference was that that was realtime.

What I'm trying to say is that this is creepy.

fredpeters• 16 years ago

I can not see how this could be efficient. The amount of time you would spend evaluating the different options and the cost of having the edits rejected would not add up.

So alternatively.. Find people you think are good by testing them. Hire them.

I would personally like a few editors that I could trust. This would sort out the privacy issues too. Is there such a service that manages these contracts? It seems like a good business idea.

recoiledsnake• 16 years ago

I stopped reading at 'Micro$oft'. I am sorry but that's pretty juvenile.

daychilde• 16 years ago

I nearly stopped - but it's the opinion of the blog writer. The video is not from the blog itself, and is definitely worth the watch.

But I agree - stupid things like 'Micro$oft' are a pet peeve of mine. I think people should use what they like and what works better for them. I personally use Windows and Linux, just for different things. And I've have a Mac box to play with if I wasn't broke.

So I suggest to anyone else who didn't watch the video - ignore the irritating blog author and check the video out. It's completely unrelated to the idiotic comment.

grinich• 16 years ago

Here's the original author's site: http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/

Paper: http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/papers/soylent-uist2010...

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_miZqsPwsc

Code: http://code.google.com/p/soylent/

Slides: http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/talks/soylent-uist2010....

Please try to link to original content for submissions.

Soylent: Mechanical Turk for Microsoft Word

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