JAKARTA - Amazon will close the door to new Mechanical Turk customers starting July 30, 2026. The crowdsourcing service can still be used by old customers, but Amazon Web Services or AWS no longer plans to add new features.
Quoted from TechCrunch, Monday, July 6, the announcement appeared on the Mechanical Turk website. AWS said the decision was made after "thorough consideration".
"Existing customers can continue to use the service as usual. AWS continues to invest in improving the security and availability of Mechanical Turk, but we do not plan to introduce new features," said AWS.
With the decision, Mechanical Turk has not been closed. However, this service is no longer directed to grow as before because it does not accept new customers and does not get new features.
Mechanical Turk was first launched in 2005. Simply put, Mechanical Turk is a micro-work market on the internet. Companies can post a large number of small tasks. Workers then work on them one by one and get a small fee for each task.
The tasks are usually simple, but it's hard for machines to do them completely. For example, solving a CAPTCHA or assessing the basic sentiment in a sentence.
In its heyday, Mechanical Turk was at the center of a debate about the ethics of digital labor. The service showed the other side of the tech industry. Behind the promise of automation, there are still people doing small, repetitive work, often paid cheaply.
Mechanical Turk was also dragged into the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. After that, starting in 2018, Amazon positioned the service as a tool for companies to annotate data to train neural networks in the SageMaker AI service.
Data annotation means labeling or describing data so that it can be understood by an AI system. For example, humans mark whether a sentence is positive or negative in tone, or recognize objects in an image. Data like this is then used to train AI models.
Mechanical Turk is an old example of how technology products still require human work behind the scenes. A number of companies have been described as using the "pretend to be AI" approach, even though their products are still driven by human labor from platforms such as Mechanical Turk.
The name Mechanical Turk itself has irony. The term refers to an 18th-century chess machine that turned out to be a hoax. Inside it is a hidden human chess player and pretending to be a machine. In the modern technological world, the irony is felt close when the product called AI still depends on the human behind the screen.
The relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI is then more complicated. TechCrunch also noted an analysis in 2023 that found that around 33 percent to 46 percent of workers on the platform used large language models to complete their tasks.
The findings raise new questions. If human workers use AI to do data labeling tasks, how reliable is the data produced? Other questions also arise, is the human still really needed in the process?
After Amazon's decision was made public, TechCrunch quoted a Reddit user who said Mechanical Turk had actually been "dead" for "years". According to the user, workers and researchers have left the platform because of bots and fraud.
"Someone at Amazon will decide that keeping the Mturk server running is a waste of time and resources, and then completely unplug it," the Reddit user wrote.
Amazon's decision does not mean that Mechanical Turk is immediately closed. However, the closure of access for new customers shows that the service space is becoming more limited.
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