Source: Seattle Times
“Amazon announced it will shutter its 21-year-old crowdsourced labor market platform, Mechanical Turk, by the end of September. Some say the rising usage of artificial intelligence delivered the fatal blow. The company launched Mechanical Turk, which users commonly call MTurk, in 2005 to pay gig workers to complete simple digital tasks that were easy for humans but challenging for computers. People looking for side jobs could transcribe audio, categorize data or label images for a few cents per task. Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos described the platform as ‘artificial artificial intelligence.’ But AI has become more capable of such mundane tasks in recent years. A 2023 study by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne found that between 33% and 46% of workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk used large language models like ChatGPT to complete some of those tasks.” (08/27/26)