Amazon will close Mechanical Turk entirely on September 30, according to a notice on the site, six weeks after it stopped taking new customers for the 21-year-old platform. MTurk paid workers a few cents a piece to label data, transcribe audio, and fill out surveys, the kind of work Jeff Bezos once called “artificial artificial intelligence” because it handed people jobs computers couldn’t do. Amazon says it served more than 500,000 turkers at its peak. Krista Pawloski of the worker advocacy group Turkopticon told CNBC the platform had been sliding for years as Amazon put less into it and Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific took the data-labeling business. Some insurance and travel firms still run on MTurk and are hunting for a replacement, and a handful of workers still do it full time.
