Amazon service Bezos once called 'artificial artificial intelligence' is shutting down

Amazon is soon pulling the plug on its 21-year-old crowdsourced work platform, called Mechanical Turk, the company said Tuesday.

"We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments," a notice posted to the Mechanical Turk, or MTurk, website said. "Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026."

Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk matches legions of workers with simple digital jobs, or "Human Intelligence Tasks," that typically pay out a few cents per task. They include labeling data, transcribing audio or video or answering surveys.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos described the service as "artificial artificial intelligence," as it farmed out tasks that could be easily completed by humans but proved too challenging for computers.

The service got its name from the original Mechanical Turk, an 18th century chess-playing robot that was actually controlled by a human chess master. Amazon originally conceived of the idea to assist with labeling reams of data on its sprawling webstore, The New York Times reported.

The platform at one point served more than 500,000 workers, also referred to as turkers, according to Amazon. But in recent years, MTurk had been "in decline," said Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon, an employee advocacy group for data workers.

AI models have advanced rapidly since MTurk first launched, while a growing crop of data startups such as Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific have entered the market to recruit workers to train the models.

Amazon also looked to capitalize on the demand for AI training by marketing MTurk as a data annotation source for its SageMaker service.

"Workers are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week," according to an Amazon Web Services webpage. "You typically get the fastest turnaround for your human review tasks and labeling jobs when you use the Amazon Mechanical Turk workforce."

Pawloski said Amazon seemed to invest fewer resources into improving MTurk at the same time as more data labeling services arrived, causing many turkers to shift to competing platforms.

Representatives from Amazon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Questions have been raised about the quality of some data generated on the platform. A 2023 study from academic researchers in Switzerland found that up to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used AI models to complete tasks.

Last month, Amazon said it would stop accepting new Mechanical Turk customers, which many workers interpreted as a sign that the service would soon be discontinued.

Some insurance and travel companies still depend on MTurk for data workers, and are now scrambling to find alternative platforms, Pawloski said.

Pawloski started turking in 2008 while she was on maternity leave for supplemental income, before transitioning to the work full time when she was let go from her job in 2012 to help take care of her son with special needs. In 2019, she started organizing with Turkopticon, which originally focused on Mechanical Turk workers before expanding to include data workers more broadly.

Mechanical Turk and other data annotation platforms provide "meaningful income" and flexible hours, similar to other gig jobs such as ride-hail services or Amazon Flex package delivery, with the added benefit of being remote and easily completed using a smartphone, Pawloski said.

"There's some people that still pretty much still do it full time," Pawloski said. "They're concerned now."

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