Amazon is closing its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform to new customers starting July 30, though existing customers can keep using it as normal.
The company said in a statement that it made the call after careful consideration, and that while it isn’t shutting Mechanical Turk down outright, it doesn’t plan to add new features going forward. A sign the service is being wound down slowly rather than all at once.
Mechanical Turk launched in 2005 as a marketplace where workers were paid small amounts to do simple tasks computers couldn’t handle well, like labeling images or reading sentiment in text. Amazon later positioned it as a tool for companies to annotate data used to train AI models. The platform has also drawn criticism over the years for enabling companies to market human labor as artificial intelligence, and for an uptick in workers themselves using AI tools to complete tasks meant to train those same systems.
