Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service now on life support as it stops accepting new users
Amazon Web Services Inc. is no longer accepting new customers for its decades-old Mechanical Turk service, in what is likely a death knell for the pioneering crowdsourcing marketplace.
First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk predates Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure business by a year. It serves as a crowdsourcing marketplace where users can post gigs that others can bid on to complete for them – tasks such as completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying the sentiment in a sentence, which cannot easily be automated any 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 within.
During its early years, Mechanical Turk was extremely successful and became part of a broader debate about the ethics of using crowdsourced labor. It also became embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica controversy that impacted Facebook. The platform pre-dates other gig marketplaces like Freelancer and Fiverr, and it later evolved into an artificial intelligence training tool. In 2018, Amazon started encouraging humans to annotate and review data that would be used to train neural networks used by the AWS SageMaker service.
