Amazon’s ‘Artificial Artificial Intelligence’ Is Being Eaten by AI

All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Gizmodo may earn an affiliate commission. In the late eighteenth century, Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen constructed what many people living at the time were duped into believing was the first truly intelligent machine: an ornate wooden chest, presided over by a magisterial wooden statue of a turbaned man—a “Turk”—that could move around the pieces of a chessboard as if by magic and win game after game against actual, human chess players. It was eventually revealed to be a hoax: A chess master would sit inside the box and control the game via an array of levers. The phrase “mechanical Turk” has since then become shorthand to describe instances in which a supposedly intelligent machine is actually an illusion, powered beneath the hood by human intelligence. It was a fitting name, therefore, for the first mainstream website that paid gig workers to complete menial digital tasks that weren’t yet amenable to automation, such as transcribing audio files, identifying objects featured in satellite images, and verifying restaurant contact information. L