An email arrived today from Amazon announcing the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service. It is named after a famous 19th century chess playing machine that turned out to really have a person inside.

Amazon touts the service as “Artificial” Artificial Intelligence. It works like this. A company may send trucks through a business district taking photos. They then need somebody to pick the best ones for a database of store images. In exchange for a couple cents a human can take a look at a few photos and select the one that best looks like a storefront.

Developers can use web services to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the developer the application sends the request to the web service. In turn the service returns the result. Behind the scenes the results are the product of human input. Humans come to the web site, search for and complete tasks and receive payment for their work.

Got spare time? Earn a few cents.