The "manual AI" mentioned by Bezos comes to an end! Amazon (AMZN.US) will shut down its long-standing crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk by the end of September.

According to Zhitong Finance APP, after halting new user registrations in July, Amazon (AMZN.US) will shut down its crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk, which has been in operation for 21 years, at the end of September. A notice on the Mechanical Turk website stated: “We regularly evaluate our projects, tools, and services, and we make adjustments based on our assessments. After evaluating, we have decided to close the AWS Mechanical Turk platform, effective September 30, 2026.”

The name Mechanical Turk comes from an 18th-century machine that claimed to play chess automatically, which was actually operated by a human chess player hidden inside. The crowdsourcing platform launched in 2005, matching large numbers of part-time workers with simple online tasks—so-called “Human Intelligence Tasks”—in which each task usually paid just a few cents. These tasks included data labeling, audio and video transcription, and filling out surveys.

Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos described this service as “artificial artificial intelligence” because it outsourced tasks that are easy for humans but too difficult for computers to humans. Reportedly, Amazon originally conceived this service to help its vast online store process a massive amount of data labeling work.

In its early years, Mechanical Turk achieved considerable success. Amazon stated that at its peak, the platform had over 500,000 registered workers, who were also known as “Turkers.” However, the platform also sparked widespread discussion around the ethics of crowdsourced labor. The platform had also been linked to the Cambridge Analytica incident that affected Facebook. Preceding other gig platforms like Freelancer and Fiverr, it gradually evolved into a tool for AI training. In 2018, Amazon began encouraging users to label and review data via the platform, thereby providing training data for the neural networks used by the AWS SageMaker service.

Since Mechanical Turk was first launched, artificial intelligence models have developed rapidly. Meanwhile, more and more data startups such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific have entered this market, recruiting workers to train these models.

Krista Pavolotsky, a staff member and activist at the data workers’ rights organization Turkopticon, said that Mechanical Turk has “declined in recent years.” She stated that as more data labeling services have entered the market, Amazon has seemed to invest fewer resources into improving Mechanical Turk, resulting in many Turkers turning to rival platforms.

In addition, there have been concerns over the quality of some data produced by the platform. A study by Swiss academic researchers in 2023 found that as many as 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used artificial intelligence models to complete tasks.

Pavolotsky noted that some insurance companies and travel companies still rely on Mechanical Turk for data workers and are now scrambling to find alternative platforms. She mentioned that Mechanical Turk and other data annotation platforms provide “meaningful income” and flexible work hours, similar to other gig jobs such as ride-hailing services or Amazon Flex package delivery. The difference is that these jobs can be performed remotely and are easily done with a smartphone. Pavolotsky said, “There are still some people who do this work almost full-time.” “They’re very worried now.”