Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk on September 30, ending the 21-year-old online marketplace that connected businesses and researchers with people willing to complete small digital tasks for pay.
What Mechanical Turk Was
Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk let workers complete “human intelligence tasks,” or HITs, such as labeling images, transcribing audio, and sorting data, typically for just a few cents per task. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once described the service as “artificial artificial intelligence,” a nod to how it relied on people to handle simple digital work that computers still couldn’t do at the time.
The Wind-Down
Amazon stopped accepting new Mechanical Turk customers on July 30, and the platform will close entirely at the end of September. Amazon Web Services has not given a specific reason for the shutdown.
Why Now
The closure comes as AI systems increasingly take over the kind of simple, repetitive data tasks Mechanical Turk workers used to handle, including many of the exact labeling and transcription jobs that helped train the machine-learning systems now replacing that work.
