Amazon is closing a platform that has become a staple for some gig workers.
According to the company, Mechanical Turk will close on September 30 a message posted on the crowdsourced work platform’s website on Tuesday.
“We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments,” the post reads. Last month, Amazon stopped accepting new users for the service.
Amazon started Mechanical Turk — dubbed “MTurk” by frequent users — in 2005. The company initially designed the tool to avoid duplicate product listings as it sold a wider range of items, The New York Times reported in 2019.
Mechanical Turk also eventually became a third-party tool to pay people for tasks that computers couldn’t perform, such as transcribing audio recordings. MTurk also became a favorite among researchers needing survey data, at least one presidential campaign.
Mechanical Turk became popular with gig workers, who were paid only a few cents per task but had more flexibility to work whenever and wherever they wanted compared to a traditional job. At its peak, the platform had more than 500,000 employees.
Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos called the service “artificial artificial intelligence” in 2007 article in De New York Times.
Today, true artificial intelligence has taken on many of the tasks that Mechanical Turk was designed to help with. And while Amazon praised MTurk As a tool for machine learning development, many AI training efforts now focus on real-world data sets.
There is also evidence that MTurk and AI are converging: One study from 2023 estimates that between 33% and 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used large language models to perform tasks on the platform.
Gig workers now perform similar tasks for AI training companies, at companies like Uber getting in on the action with data labeling gigs.
There is even a market for pure sell data or documents to AI training companies.
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