What Amazon crowdsourcing site lets requesters post Human Intelligence Tasks?

Amazon Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s crowdsourcing website where requesters post Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs.

The platform connects requesters—businesses, researchers, and other employers—with remote workers who complete small online tasks that computers may handle poorly or inefficiently. Examples include labeling images, checking data, writing short descriptions, transcribing text, and answering surveys. Workers browse available HITs and receive payment set by the requester after accepted work.

Amazon launched Mechanical Turk in 2005. Its name comes from the eighteenth-century Mechanical Turk, a famous chess-playing automaton that appeared to defeat human opponents. The historical machine was eventually exposed as a cabinet concealing a human chess player. The modern service similarly places human judgment behind a technological interface, an idea Amazon has described as “artificial artificial intelligence.”

A common mistake is treating Mechanical Turk as an ordinary employment agency or an automated AI system. It is a task marketplace, and Amazon generally classifies workers as independent contractors rather than employees. The service has been widely used for data preparation and research, but scholars also debate worker pay, working conditions, sample quality, and the ethics of crowdsourced labor.