Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk operates on a principle known as "crowdsourcing." Crowdsourcing is a method where an employer with work to be done breaks it down into simple tasks and provides it to a crowd (in this case Mechanical Turk workers) to be done. Employers on Mechanical Turk are known as a "requester" and the work to be done  are called "HITs" which is an acronym for "human intelligence tasks." Amazon markets this as "artificial artificial intelligence" as these are tasks requiring human intelligence that computers are not capable of doing. Typically these tasks include things such as tagging photos, flagging inappropriate photos, organizing information by category, basic data entry, filling out surveys, or writing short blurbs.

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