We owe our understanding of human behavior thanks, in part, to Bob. He spends hours some days as a subject in academic psychology studies, filling out surveys on crowd-work platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, where users perform simple digital tasks for small sums of money. The questionnaires often prompt him to recall a time he felt sad, or isolated, or something likewise morose. Sometimes typing his sob stories over and over gets “really really monotonous,” he says. So Bob asks ChatGPT to pour its simulacrum of a heart out instead.
Bob, who used a pseudonym because he fears having his account suspended, says he respects the research he contributes to but doesn’t feel especially conflicted about using an occasional assist from AI. The prompts seem intended to establish a certain mood to set up later questions, and “I can get myself into that mindset,” he says. On top of that, Bob needs to be efficient because he supports himself with crowd work, sometimes filling out 20 surveys in a single day, alongside other microtasks like training chatbots. One 2018 study estimated that crowdworkers make $2 per hour on average, including time spent finding tasks, although Bob makes significantly more.
Students, office workers, coders, and dungeon masters are turning to generative AI tools like ChatGPT to optimize their work in ways that have invited both praise and suspicion. Crowd workers are the latest group to face accusations of using large language models as a shortcut. Some platforms are now adopting policies or technology designed to deter or detect use of large language models like ChatGPT, although some crowd workers and researchers say that care is needed to avoid unfairly burdening workers already facing precarity.
A preprint study from academics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology went viral last month after it estimated that more than a third of Mechanical Turkers had used ChatGPT to complete a text summarization task intended to measure human understanding. Its claim that crowd workers widely use large language models inspired some workers and researchers to push back, defending crowd workers’ honor and saying clearer instructions could curb the problem.
CloudResearch, a company that helps researchers recruit online study participants, ran its own version of the study and found that its prescreened workers used ChatGPT only a fifth of the time. Usage nearly disappeared altogether when the company asked people not to use AI, says cofounder and chief research officer Leib Litman.
One crowd worker in her fifties who is active in an online community of Turkers says many wouldn’t dream of cheating. “The people I know have integrity to a fault,” she says. Crowd work can provide a refuge for people who like to arrange work on their own terms, she says, such as introverts or neurodivergent people. “They wouldn’t dream of using ChatGPT to write a summary, because it would be extremely unsatisfying,” says the worker, who herself likes crowd work as a way to avoid age discrimination. Another worker tells WIRED she managed to support herself off of Mechanical Turk when an illness confined her to working from home. She wouldn’t want to risk losing her income due to an account suspension.
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