Tech giant is now shutting down its more than two-decade-old crowdsourced work platform, Mechanical Turk, the company said on Tuesday.
The crowdsourced work platform will shut down on 30 September, Mechanical Turk wrote in a notice posted on its website, adding, “We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments.” It further said, “Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective 30 September 2026.”
What is Amazon Mechanical Turk?
Introduced in 2005, Mechanical Turk connects large numbers of workers with basic online tasks, known as “Human Intelligence Tasks”, which generally pay just a few cents each. These tasks can involve data labelling, audio or video transcription, and completing .
According to the company’s website, these tasks could include anything from simple data validation and research to more subjective tasks such as survey participation and content moderation. Mechanical Turk enables companies to harness the collective intelligence, skills, and insights from a global workforce to streamline business processes, augment and analysis, and accelerate machine learning development.
According to CNBC, Amazon founder referred to the service as “artificial artificial intelligence”, describing how it outsourced tasks that humans could perform easily but computers found difficult.
Why is MTurk shutting down?
According to , at one point, the company employed more than 500,000 workers, known as Turkers. Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organiser with Turkopticon, an employee advocacy group for data workers, said that in recent years, MTurk had been “in decline.”
She added that the tech giant had seemingly invested fewer resources in improving the platform at a time when more data-labelling services had emerged, leading more Turkers to shift to rival platforms.
Since MTurk was first launched, (AI) models have advanced rapidly, with a growing number of data startups, including Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific, entering the market to recruit workers to train the models. The company also sought to tap into the growing demand for AI training by positioning MTurk as a source of data annotation for its SageMaker service.
Questions have also emerged over the quality of some data produced through the platform. A 2023 study by academic researchers in found that as many as 46 per cent of Mechanical Turk workers used AI models to complete tasks.
Last month, Amazon announced it would no longer accept new Mechanical Turk customers, a move many workers interpreted as an indication the service could soon be discontinued.
According to the Amazon Web Services () website, “Workers are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.” It added, “You typically get the fastest turnaround for your human review tasks and labelling jobs when you use the Amazon Mechanical Turk workforce.”
Why is it called Mechanical Turk?
According to The New York Times, the service takes its name from the original Mechanical Turk, an 18th-century chess-playing machine operated secretly by a human chess master. The tech giant reportedly developed the service to help handle the vast amounts of data generated by its sprawling store.