Amazon stops taking new Mechanical Turk customers as the crowd-work era ends

From CAPTCHAs to AI training data

Mechanical Turk opened in 2005 as a marketplace for "human intelligence tasks": pennies apiece for labelling images, solving CAPTCHAs, rating sentiment. Around 2018 Amazon repositioned it as a pipeline for annotating the data that trains AI models. The name was always a wink. The 18th-century Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing "automaton" with a human crouched inside working the pieces. Years of bots and low-effort fraud had hollowed the marketplace out well before this week's notice.

"A dead end back then"

Insiders saw the decline coming a long way off. An engineer who inherited the manager who used to run it:

Back around 10 years ago, I gained a new manager who had previously managed mechanical turk. It was already recognised as a dead end back then.

Others rejected the tidy story that AI killed the platform. One reply put the cause elsewhere:

This has very little to do with "AI replacing jobs" and much much more to do with a bad product getting obsoleted by better ones.

On the automation angle, one commenter cautioned against overreading it:

Absolutely does not imply the workers are automated since they can now use the current models to do more complex tasks at the vast number of new AI training data startups.

The irony holds either way: a service built to route work to hidden humans is closing just as those humans learned to hide a machine inside their own answers.