Comment by electroly

Several times, I had MTurk workers transcribe a yearly printed pricing catalog that was a boon to our small business. Inconsistently-structured tabular data intermixed with pictures that OCR of the day did a terrible job with.

Later, we needed to choose the best-looking product picture from a series of possible pictures (collected online) for every SKU, for use in our website's inventory browser. MTurk to the rescue--their human taste was perfect, and it was effortless on my part.

Neither of these were earthshattering from a tech perspective, and I'm sure these days AI could do it, but back then MTurk was the perfect solution. Humans make both random and consistent errors and it was kinda fun to learn how to deal with both kinds of error. I learned lots of little tricks to lower the error rate. As a rule, I always paid out erroneous submissions (you can choose to reject them but it's easier to just pay for all submissions) and just worked to improve my prompts. I never had anyone maliciously or intentionally try to submit incomplete or wrong work, but lots of "junk" happens with the best of intentions.