[lstyls]

It's pretty obvious what GP meant. The concept of crowd-sourcing small chunks of work as a service is not the same thing as a hoax which involved a single person masquerading as an automaton. Amazon chose a clever name for its service that is memorable and references humans fronted by machines.

Asserting otherwise is an example of the etymological fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy.

[Retric]

Ehh, I have seen references to using a person instead of an algorithm before Amazon released their service. Basically, if your automating human dexterity it's robotics, if your automating the brain it's AI. Sorting vegetables being a useful early example where humans could be thought of as a replaceable black box if you can break down what they are specifically doing. Thus Machine vision and classification where two common tasks because you need to play any game not simply replay a specific one.

[toomanybeersies]

The term "mechanical turk" has been used to describe "fake AI" since before Amazon Mechanical Turk was released.