MTurk, as it was called, was a generalist platform, meaning it didn’t cater to any particular kind of work. It was just a self-service website. Its interface—stuck in the web design of the mid-aughts, when it launched—had a place to upload datasets, to specify simple annotation instructions, and to set a price for the work. Once the task was claimed, it showed randomized strings of numbers and letters in place of the workers’ names. It had two buttons next to each worker: one to give them a bonus, the other to boot them off the project. Data annotation for self-driving cars necessitated a
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