Using Mechanical Turk to write a short story

http://www.subelsky.com/2011/12/writing-short-horror-story-with-amazon.html

by subelsky • 15 years ago

11 2 15 years ago

Jun8• 15 years ago

The resulting story is (as expected) not good. As for the cost, assuming 10 words per sentence on the average, he pays $0.01 per word. Compare with what some magazines pay: http://johnaugust.com/2009/how-much-does-a-short-story-earn-..., since most sentences will be crap, it's not that much cheaper.

However, I still think this is fantastic! Obviously it can be of use of seeding thoughts to get out of a writer's block, someone can offer this as a service. However, the cooler application would be to couple this with an AI trained on contemporary literature to select more promising sentences automatically. This may also be applicable to other fields, i.e. painting, where you can ask people to come up with local abstract designs and put them together to get the final picture.

subelsky• 15 years ago

I had the same thought about somehow using AI to make this completely automatic and increase the quality of the story. Turk does have the ability to allow workers to upload files so producing binary data like images or videos is definitely possible.

As for the cost, I was following ProPublica's advice. Apparently workers assume that less expensive jobs can be done more quickly, and if you make them too expensive the process can actually take longer:

http://www.propublica.org/article/propublicas-guide-to-mecha...

Using Mechanical Turk to write a short story

Related Stories