Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

Worth noting that one of the most high profile uses of Mechanical Turk was in September 2007 to review satellite imagery in a massive crowdsourced effort to find missing record-setting aviator Steve Fossett.

The effort failed to find any areas of interest and the missing aviator was found the following year by a hiker. I wonder if there was any analysis after the fact to understand if the imagery actually provided any hints regarding the eventual crash site.

Mechanical Turk had a good run, but not surprised it's shutting down. I'm sure the platform was getting flooded with people doing task arbitrage and using lots of AI anyway.

I believe the issue is that this can no longer be a horizontal play. MTurk was mostly for unskilled tasks...the kind AI can do well enough that it isn't worth the cost differential to verify it or keep farmed to humans. The "trust but verify" AI output is now the kind that requires domain expertise. This is what most full stack AI companies are bringing to industries.

Curious if this kind of work will come around again one day or was just a moment in time. If it does I'm sure it will be specifically about generating training data.

As AMT's largest requester for the past 10 years, this news was relayed to requesters at the same time as respondents. It's also worth noting that our lead contact, the Sr Program Manager at AWS leading AMT, transitioned to Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker Model Evaluations a ~2-3 years ago.. Leaving behind essential zero team managing the project after they migrated over the stored value accounts to native AWS billing.

So, I have a story to share about Mechanical Turk that you might find interesting. I’ve shared it a couple of times before on Twitter and Bluesky, but I’ll share it again.

Long story short: Mechanical Turk saved my bacon.

Back in 2005, I was working a job at a small-town newspaper in a town I’d never lived before. I didn’t know anyone beyond the staff (as I was working layout rather than as a reporter), and I had gotten interested in the idea of doing Mechanical Turk for a few extra bucks. I thought there might be a formative scene of interested people doing this, so I started working on a blog for it. I briefly collaborated on it with another guy who put it on forum software because he didn’t know how to use, like Drupal.

That blog was called Turking.com, and it seemed like it was going well for a bit. We even got a mention on the AWS website. But after about two or three months, it was clear the initial excitement around the idea (and the initial work) had died down. (The work picked up later, but in clearly different ways. I don’t think folks were really “excited” about it after that point.)

If you want to get an idea of it, there was one capture on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20051124231722/http://www.turkin...

The site had started to die out in part because my iBook suffered a catastrophic GPU failure and me, being a broke small-town newspaper employee, did not have the money to replace it. Plus, the community just hadn’t emerged like we had expected.

But then I got an email out of the blue: Someone wanted to buy my domain, which I owned outright, but they didn’t want to say who. I got contacted by a broker, and the exchange took place over escrow.

(The domain most assuredly was bought by Amazon and is managed by MarkMonitor.)

I didn’t get a ton of money from the deal, but I did get enough to pay for a new laptop. I had some regrets about selling it (in part because I originally built the site with someone else), but I was in a bit of a dire financial situation which that proved to be the starting point for getting myself out of.

That domain purchase was notably more than I ever made from clicking and classifying random pictures, that said.

It’s kind of crazy they’re shutting this down just when this Service probably has the most possibilities ever. You have an agent with Multiple people doing actual physical tasks in the real world seems like something that could be really powerful.

Interesting. I remember reading the book "Life 3.0" years ago, where one of the first things the fictional AGI does to make money is perform tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk while pretending to be human.

FWIW I tried it shortly after it launched so a bit after ~2005, maybe 2007 because I read about and honestly found the prospect, from a dataset creation or improvement, quite interesting. I think I heard about it from a research paper that distributed its work that way.

Well it did work, in the sense that I managed to complete some tasks. I don't think I ever collected the money/credits back then though (simply because it amounted to so little). What I can attest though is that... it was debilitating. If you think your office job is boring then splitting it in way smaller tasks where you have no autonomy is absolutely terrible from a worker standpoint.

I initially was hoping to use it in order to work on providing a service over a dataset but understanding first hand what it takes to make it happen made me stop. It radically changed how I saw supervised learning since, and sadly not in a good way.

I used it to have people transcribe my dad’s handwritten letters and journals. It was touching to get notes from a “Turk” saying how much she enjoyed his travels and following the cast of characters in his life!

Had some absolutely bizarre results from their attempt to integrate mturk with Bedrock's 'ground truth' thing as of a few months ago. Threw simple mnist digits recognition at it, see what the quality, timing, and cost was. Figured mnist digits was at this point trivial. Spent $10 and the accuracy was marginally better than guessing, completely unusable results. Was completely baffled, people were publishing peer reviewed research based on exclusively mturk results.

I've used Mechanical Turk in the early days but developed my own version for my vertical to manage freelancers.

The problem as I see it is verifying the work is not done by AI. If it was possible to verify somehow that the work is definitely not done by AI I think there would still be a market for this. But the data just cannot be trusted.

An increasingly big part of my job is to try and weed out workers who use AI and it's not an easy task at scale because generally workers gain trust with manual work and then there is degradation over time.

Prior discussion from when the service stopped accepting new customers in July: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48803886

I'll still be around on Oct 1.

I did this a long time ago and it actually paid for a few meals.

They are terribly monotonous tasks.

I can see why it's shutting down if its still the same thing.

Lllms could probably do everything there without rotting out minds for basically pennies.

The tagline for MTurk used to be “artificial artificial intelligence.”

It appears now we can get along with just a single “artificial.”

The only time I ever used it (as a turk?) was when Jim Gray went missing at sea and satellite imagery of vast regions of the pacific were fed through Mechanical Turk. Seems a trivial problem now, but was not then, and needed humans to take a look.

Amazon / AWS went from boasting about how they never killed off products to just going on a steady binge of shutting things down. That wouldn’t necessarily be bad if they were replacing this with better stuff, but most of the new launches also seem on a path to eventual culling too.

Reminds me of Expensify's usage of Amazon Mechanical Turk.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/expen...

MTurk existed since forever, and somehow flew under the radar for all these years. Very few developers I know didn't even know it existed.

Cut off one mechanical turk and two more will rise to take it's place.

Absent visibility into AWS P&Ls--even notwithstanding AI--Mechanical Turk has been a real outlier at AWS for a number of years now, so not really surprising.

I was just thinking about the good old days combining human judgements on mturk for classifying high-value forum threads. Since replaced by using judgements from multiple LLMs.

The only use I can think of it these days is for social scientists who need to gather judgements from bona fide humans.

This will be devastating for a lot of workers in low-infrastructure countries.

Surprised Amazon managed to fumble mechanical turk at the same time Mercor/Scale and all these other companies started hiring humans to do data labeling tasks.

I wouldn't be surprised if Fiverr and Upwork start pulling back too. There's just so much AI bots now that have flooded the task marketplace.

I made a couple thousand dollars off it squeezing in tasks here and there between meetings. Amazon Payments were challenging to redeem as I recall. I did more or less write the bulk of someone’s doctoral thesis. Kept giving me a dollar to summarize the findings of various psychology papers. The most memorable was the one where people were put in a room and someone sprayed “liquid ass” on the wall. The subjects given no explanation experienced higher levels of anxiety than those that were told there was a sewage leak being repaired. One of the strangest dollars I ever made. My PS4 and game collection was spectacular.

I was literally wondering this morning if mturk was still around! I assumed a lot of the stuff could just be done with LLMs and OCI now.

great news for us at geobounties! we allow ai agents to deploy humans for real world tasks. a true mechanical turk! : ) now your ai assistant can even get your coffee for you! (sorry Peggy Olson!)

End of an era.

Evil business, glad to be rid of it.

mission completed

I wonder why.

bezos has determined LLM has replaced "on demand 24/7 workforce"