Amazon shuts Mechanical Turk to new customers, signalling the end of an early crowdsourcing era

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will stop signing up new customers for its Mechanical Turk platform on July 30, marking the end of an era for one of the internet's first crowdsourcing services that was used for data labelling and many other human-assisted digital tasks.In a notice on its Mechanical Turk website, AWS said it made the decision "after careful consideration." Existing customers will continue to have access to the platform and Amazon said it will continue to improve security and availability. But the company said there are no plans for new features for the service.Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk connected businesses with a global workforce that completed small online tasks, such as image classification, content moderation, survey participation and data annotation. The platform later grew into a popular tool for training machine learning models, providing large datasets labeled with specific categories.Its development has paralleled the rise of artificial intelligence. Mechanical Turk was used to fill the holes that automation couldn’t, but as AI has gotten better, the demand for a lot of the rote work that used to need humans has steadily gone down. At the same time, generative AI has introduced new challenges, with studies indicating that some workers are increasingly using large language models to complete assignments, raising concerns about the quality of human-labelled datasets.The platform has also been criticized over the years for worker pay, transparency and labor practices, becoming a focal point in debates around the gig economy and the ethics of digital piecework. However, the service was still widely used by researchers and technology companies for behavioural studies, AI research and dataset generation.Amazon hasn’t said it will close Mechanical Turk altogether, but the move to not take on new customers indicates the platform is no longer a strategic growth focus as Amazon turns its attention toward newer AI services and cloud products.Also read: Amazon to hire 11,000 interns as AWS CEO says adaptability will outweigh coding skills in AI era