February 25, 2026Roque E. de Campos / Edit

This is an original metaphor that should not be confused with  Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) , which is a crowdsourcing marketplace that connects companies with people to perform micro-tasks that require human intelligence and that computers cannot yet perform efficiently or economically. It is also known as the  Automaton Chess Player , as explained to those who clicked on the sign in the image above.

How it Works

• Requesters:  Companies or researchers who create and publish assignments.
• Workers:  People around the world (known as “Turkers”) who choose and complete these tasks in exchange for payment.
• HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks):  These are individual tasks posted on the platform, such as identifying objects in photos, transcribing audio, answering academic surveys, or moderating content. 

Key Points

• Payments:  Each task (HIT) usually pays small amounts, which can range from  US$0.01 to a few dollars .
• Use in AI:  The service is widely used to train machine learning algorithms by providing human-labeled data.
• Origin of the Name:  The name comes from an 18th-century chess-playing “automaton” that actually concealed a human chess master inside to win the games.