Amazon billed Mechanical Turk as 'Artificial Artificial Intelligence'

When Amazon Web Services launched Amazon Mechanical Turk on November 2, 2005, it described the service as a way to integrate “Artificial Artificial Intelligence” directly into software. The phrase captured the inversion at the heart of the product: to a requester’s program, it looked as if an AI system was solving a task, but in reality humans were doing the work behind the interface. The official announcement framed it as filling a gap in automation - “What if a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results?” The name itself echoes the 18th-century Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing “automaton” that secretly hid a human operator inside.