"Mechanical Turk" to deceive venture investors
The principle of "mechanical Turk" inspires modern entrepreneurs to exploits. The first startups appeared that deliberately conceal the fact of using cheap human “workers”, and instead intentionally thicken the atmosphere of mystery around their mythical innovations, creating the appearance of a tough technological solution.
Michael Arrington c TechCrunch the other day exposed one such scam. A new startup TagCow caught up with the fear of competitors by releasing the “automatic” service (as written on their website) to recognize objects in photos. The mystery engine worked surprisingly well and for several minutes created tag sets for thousands of photos. No one could understand what kind of technology underlies the engine, because it provides an order of magnitude better recognition quality than any previously known program.
However, the secret could not keep long. Soon it turned out that TagCow was simply banishing object recognition tasks to the well-known mechanical crowdsourcing service Mechanical Turk , paying for the work of “lemmings” at $ 0.04 for a set of five photos. This is quite a high price, since with good Internet speed it makes it possible to earn up to $ 1.20 per hour, which is comparable to the average Russian salary.
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The question remains, why does TagCow hide the fact of crowdsourcing and for what purpose does it pay for the work of “mechanical Turks”? The most likely answer here is a scam to impersonate a technologically advanced start-up and get venture capital investments from a trustful investor, with whom we are currently negotiating. If the startup had not attracted the attention of the press, the scam could well have happened.
Michael Arrington c TechCrunch the other day exposed one such scam. A new startup TagCow caught up with the fear of competitors by releasing the “automatic” service (as written on their website) to recognize objects in photos. The mystery engine worked surprisingly well and for several minutes created tag sets for thousands of photos. No one could understand what kind of technology underlies the engine, because it provides an order of magnitude better recognition quality than any previously known program.
However, the secret could not keep long. Soon it turned out that TagCow was simply banishing object recognition tasks to the well-known mechanical crowdsourcing service Mechanical Turk , paying for the work of “lemmings” at $ 0.04 for a set of five photos. This is quite a high price, since with good Internet speed it makes it possible to earn up to $ 1.20 per hour, which is comparable to the average Russian salary.
')
The question remains, why does TagCow hide the fact of crowdsourcing and for what purpose does it pay for the work of “mechanical Turks”? The most likely answer here is a scam to impersonate a technologically advanced start-up and get venture capital investments from a trustful investor, with whom we are currently negotiating. If the startup had not attracted the attention of the press, the scam could well have happened.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/22850/
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