Amazon to shut down Mechanical Turk, its 'artificial artificial intelligence' platform

"We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments," a notice on the Mechanical Turk website said. "Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk."

Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk connected workers with simple digital jobs, or "Human Intelligence Tasks," that typically paid a few cents per task. These included labeling data, transcribing audio or video, and answering surveys. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called the service "artificial artificial intelligence" because it outsourced tasks that were easy for humans but difficult for computers.

The platform's name came from an 18th-century chess-playing robot that was secretly controlled by a human chess master. Amazon originally used the service to help label large amounts of data on its online store, according to The New York Times.

At its peak, Mechanical Turk served more than 500,000 workers, known as turkers, according to Amazon. In recent years, however, the platform has been "in decline," said Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon, an advocacy group for data workers.

AI models have advanced rapidly since Mechanical Turk's launch, while data startups such as Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific have entered the market to recruit workers for training models. Amazon also marketed Mechanical Turk as a data annotation source for its SageMaker service, with an AWS webpage stating, "Workers are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."

Pawloski told CNBC that Amazon appeared to invest fewer resources in improving Mechanical Turk as more data labeling services emerged, leading many turkers to shift to competing platforms. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Concerns have also been raised about data quality on the platform. A 2023 study by Swiss academic researchers found that up to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used AI models to complete tasks.

Last month, Amazon said it would stop accepting new Mechanical Turk customers, which many workers saw as a sign that the service would soon end. Pawloski said some insurance and travel companies still depend on Mechanical Turk and are now searching for alternatives.

Pawloski began working on the platform in 2008 and later did it full time. She described Mechanical Turk and other data annotation platforms as providing "meaningful income" and flexible hours, similar to gig jobs like ride-hailing, with the added benefit of being remote and accessible via smartphone. "There's some people that still pretty much still do it full time," she said. "They're concerned now."