Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service now on life support because it stops accepting recent users

Amazon Web Services Inc. isn’t any longer accepting recent customers for its decades-old Mechanical Turk service, in what is probably going a death knell for the pioneering crowdsourcing marketplace.

Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk predates Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure business by a yr. It serves as a crowdsourcing marketplace where users can post gigs that others can bid on to finish for them – tasks reminiscent of completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying the sentiment in a sentence, which cannot easily be automated some other way.

Mechanical Turk’s name references an 18th century chess machine which was claimed to be fully automated, but was actually secretly operated by a human chess master hidden inside.

During its early years, Mechanical Turk was extremely successful and have become a part of a broader debate concerning the ethics of using crowdsourced labor. It also became embroiled within the Cambridge Analytica controversy that hit Facebook. The platform predates other gig marketplaces reminiscent of Freelancer and Fiverr, and it later evolved into a synthetic intelligence training tool. In 2018, Amazon began encouraging humans to annotate and review data that will be used to coach neural networks utilized by the AWS SageMaker service.

Nonetheless, evidently Amazon has decided that Mechanical Turk isn’t any longer useful, for the service is now in “Maintenance,” which suggests that it’ll likely be retired soon. On its website, Amazon states that the service will likely be “closed to recent customers, effective July 30, 2026. Existing users is not going to be impacted by this alteration.”

In consequence, Mechanical Turk will now not be accepting jobs for SageMaker or some other tasks, AWS told The Register in a press release. The OG crowdsourcing platform is due to this fact on its last legs, and can likely be shut down completely within the not-too-distant future, TechCrunch reported.

Though Amazon hasn’t officially condemned the platform yet, it’s clear that it’s now not really needed, as the corporate now offers another service for collecting machine learning data in SageMaker Ground Truth. As well as, the AWS cloud supports integration with third-party crowdsourcing platforms.

On the r/mturk subreddit, one user suggested that the service has been “dead” for years, with Amazon closing employee’s accounts seemingly at random, with no detailed explanation as to why it had done so. “Mturk helped me start on online gig work, so I’m grateful for it only for that,” wrote Bermin299. “The cash I created from Mturk back then really helped me out during some tight financial times up to now, which I’m also grateful for. It’s like seeing an old friend well past their expiration date finally getting put to rest.”

Image: AWS