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Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk
TechCrunch • • business
Key Points:
- Amazon Mechanical Turk will stop accepting new customers after July 30, 2026, though existing users can continue using the service without new feature updates.
- Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk allowed people to perform simple, low-paid tasks that were difficult to automate, playing a significant role in crowdsourced labor debates and early data scandals.
- Since 2018, Amazon positioned Mechanical Turk as a tool for data annotation to train AI models through its SageMaker service, linking it closely to the development of artificial intelligence.
- The platform has been criticized for enabling AI products that rely heavily on human workers behind the scenes, echoing the original Mechanical Turk hoax of a hidden human operator.
- A 2023 study revealed that a significant portion of Mechanical Turk workers used AI tools themselves to complete tasks, raising concerns about data quality and the necessity of human involvement.
