Source: In These Times
by Krista Pawloski
“I’ll never forget my first job working on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project, back in 2008. I was on maternity leave and needed some extra cash to make ends meet, so for several hours a day I would look at and tag photos with as many keywords as possible. If I was looking at a picture of a cloud in the sky, for instance, I would tag additional words such as ’sky’, ‘daylight’ and ‘atmosphere’. I didn’t know then that Mechanical Turk, or MTurk as it came to be called, would become my fulltime job and that in the process I would become one of the hundreds of thousands of data workers who built the backbone of Big Tech’s AI machine. After a little more than two decades of service, Amazon shut down MTurk for good on September 30 of this year.” (10/16/26)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/amazon-ai-artificial-intelligence-mturk