mechanical turk
The mechanical turk was an an 18th-century automaton, appeared to play chess autonomously while concealing a human operator inside—an illusion of automation.
Today, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsource platform similarly hides the labor of thousands of distributed workers performing data labeling tasks to train machine learning models. Their work, much like the Turk’s hidden chess player, is intentionally shrouded, classified as ‘ghost work’—repetitive, low-cost, and unseen, yet critical to the operation of AI systems. it is invisible, often undermined labor that powers modern automation but is often dismissed in favor of the ‘magic’ of AI.
Working on the repetitive colorwork of this pieces was a reflection on my own time as a full-time data labeler in 2018, reminding myself of the labour involved with data preparation.
