

Using Mechanical Turk to write a short story - subelsky
http://www.subelsky.com/2011/12/writing-short-horror-story-with-amazon.html

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Jun8
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-...](http://johnaugust.com/2009/how-much-does-a-short-story-earn-in-a-
magazine), 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.

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subelsky
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...](http://www.propublica.org/article/propublicas-guide-to-mechanical-
turk)

