social turkers:

crowdsourced dating

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Avg MTurk interaction rating: 2.25

After the previous night, I offer more money in an effort to attract more workers. As usual, I get to the bar a little early to make sure everything is running smoothly. Once I’m there, he texts me saying he will be a little late, so I sit at an empty table and wait. A pair of older guys approach and accuse me of stealing their table, then “offer” to share it with me. They sit down and start hitting on me in an extremely aggressive and insulting way, but I don’t want to leave the table because it offers a good amount of space for positioning my camera. I start the streaming and figure I might as well let the workers weigh in on the situation. The instructions are helpful only in passing the time, “smile”, “laugh”, “agree” they say. But the descriptions that I view later are interesting — even in the dark and noise of the bar, a lot of them seem to pick up on the aggressive and confrontational attitude of the men.

After 20 mins of sitting there while the men calling me cold and a bitch and a tease, my date finally arrives with a friend of his. They join us at the table and the two of them sit down unnecessarily close on either side of me, sandwiching me in uncomfortably tightly. I’m a bit surprised he would bring his friend along on a date, but figured he decided to make it more of a friendly thing, and decide to go along with it. I try to bring his friend into our conversation, but the friend barely responds, staring straight ahead while trying to fondle my purse. The other men are still at our table whispering together and laughing and pointing and staring at me.

Meanwhile, my date is telling me about how he likes making videos where he goes out in public and fucks with unsuspecting people. I start to wonder if this is what’s happening right now, the situation seems a little too excessive to be real. I feel annoyed and resentful thinking about the possibility that he could be messing with me like this. I wonder how it is different than what I am doing. Maybe I am a bitch. These nonstop dates with strangers and workers are really starting to wear on me. It’s late and I’m suddenly completely tired and I make some bad excuse and flee.

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Avg MTurk interaction rating: 2.8

This guy is cute. Though not usually one to get super nervous around guys, the added preoccupation of getting the system up and running at the start of our time together makes me bumbling and awkward. I can see how nervous I may seem and it adds to my embarrassed lack of suaveness. Surprisingly, he doesn’t seem to pick up on this too much, or if he does, he lets it go in a casual, smooth way. The workers are not so forgiving, ‘The woman seems apprehensive, guarded and not terribly interested in the man. It could just be nerves but she appears to be uncomfortable. The amount of times she goes for her beverage shows me she’s nervous also.’ I am constantly surprised by how much they are able to perceive from a few minutes observation of a low fidelity video stream. It is almost as if because they are not physically present, they are able to observe more objectively and see the obvious that might go unnoticed by the participants wrapped up in the interaction.

One aspect of this project that is particularly interesting to me is the experience for the workers, it is sort of a performance for them in a way. On Wikipedia, the search for “artificial artificial intelligence” redirects to the page about Amazon Mechanical Turk. I am interested in this idea of these workers logging on expecting to do a series of very mechanical tasks that a computer would ideally do, but are instead confronted with the request for a very human reaction. Some of their responses are amazing.

‘But I imagine that even the most affective interactions leave those involved with distaste, weakened and hungry. I said “buying items” because I would want my character to have a history/a past… Not to say that she doesn’t, and in fact I find myself relating to both characters, but the problem of the actor is negligible when a theater-goer is asleep, or when we do not understand the accents, or when we understand each character independently.’

Many of the workers are very excited about the task, and leave their unsolicited emails and contact info asking that I send them updates as the project progresses. In some weird way, I’ve almost started to feel like they are my friends watching and helping me along on each date. They are the only ones that really know what I’m doing, they are my confidantes, my collaborators.

I get through the rest of the date with only minor stumbles as instructions sometimes clash with what I’m wanting to say and do.

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More to come…

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I describe the project to him and explain that he can use the workers as sort of wingmen, asking them questions and getting responses without my knowing the content of their communication. Is this a cover story, he asks. The FBI might concoct a story as strange as mine to misdirect attention, he tells me. I assure him it’s not and wonder why that is his first instinct. With this issue apparently settled, he’s interested and into the idea, but as soon as I turn on the camera he tenses up and gets nervous to think of everyone watching. This is something I’ve never felt, I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been working with and thinking about these technologies for so long, or because I feel some more control as the creator of the system. For me, the gaze of the workers seems to provide company and comfort. He asks one questions, but due to a technical issue the system isn’t working tonight. This on the fly coding I’ve been doing is catching up with me. Disappointing, as it seemed to be going somewhere interesting…

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Avg MTurk interaction rating: 2.8

I set up the interface tonight to allow the workers to suggest and vote on lines for me to say, rather than having them all come through causing me to have to spew constant nonsense. I’m interested in the possibility for the workers to work together and influence each other. Previously, I could recite the lines as they came in at rapid random pace, feeling like I was just some character detached from the reality of the situation. As the lines came less frequently, I am able to work them more naturally into the conversation and use them as a guide, pushing us in unexpected directions. I no longer feel like just a character or an avatar; the distinction before between performance and reality gets blurrier for me. One of the main goals of this project is to try to create some sort of freedom from myself. As directions come to say things I wouldn’t normally, I’m suddenly made aware of how many limitations I normally have. I realize that I hold onto this self concept and consider certain actions outside the set of things I do. As I submit to the directions, it feels at first completely uncomfortable. Somewhere halfway through the date though, I realize I really can break out of myself a bit. The realization is overwhelmingly powerful.

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