Crowdsourcing with $100

Posted 11 weeks ago by Evan Tishuk

Step one is to carve an image of a $100 bill into exactly 10,000 equal-sized rectangular cells. Ignore the likelihood that scanning currency onto your computer is probably a felony. Then use the Mechanical Turk to pay 10,000 individuals 1 penny each to trace one of those cells. Lastly recombine all 10,000 individual renderings and play back the whole process. What you get is a damn cool piece of art that says something about crowdsourcing. I'm drawn to the cells where some people just didn't put in much effort. And for one lousy penny, I don't blame them. However, that makes me want to run a series of similar experiments with progressively increasing payments. I wonder how much the quality would improve and at what price the overall quality plateaus.

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