Amazon kills platform paying humans for tasks AI couldn't do
What's the story
Amazon has announced the closure of its 21-year-old crowdsourced work platform, Mechanical Turk. The decision comes after a regular evaluation of its programs and services. "Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026," a notice on the MTurk website said. The platform was launched in 2005 to connect workers with simple digital jobs or "Human Intelligence Tasks."
Platform evolution
MTurk was designed to outsource easy tasks
Mechanical Turk, or MTurk, was designed to outsource tasks that are easy for humans but hard for computers.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once called the service "artificial artificial intelligence."
The platform's name comes from an 18th-century chess-playing robot that was actually controlled by a human chess master.
Initially, it was created to help label large amounts of data on Amazon's webstore.
User base
Platform has been in decline in recent years
MTurk once had a user base of over 500,000 workers, also known as turkers.
However, Krista Pawloski, a data worker and Turkopticon organizer, said that the platform has been "in decline" in recent years.
The rapid advancement of AI models and the emergence of data start-ups like Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific have contributed to this trend.
AI training
Competing platforms and AI models have impacted MTurk
Amazon also tried to leverage the demand for AI training by promoting MTurk as a data annotation source for its SageMaker service.
However, as more data labeling services emerged, many turkers started migrating to competing platforms due to perceived lack of investment from Amazon in improving MTurk.
A 2023 study found that up to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used AI models to complete tasks.
Service discontinuation
Impacts of Mechanical Turk's closure
Last month, Amazon said it would stop accepting new Mechanical Turk customers, a move many workers interpreted as a sign of impending service discontinuation.
The closure will affect some insurance and travel companies that still rely on MTurk for data work. These companies are now racing against time to find alternative platforms.
Pawloski said Mechanical Turk and other data annotation platforms provide "meaningful income" and flexible hours like other gig jobs such as ride-hail services or Amazon Flex package delivery.