Amazon shuts down Mechanical Turk, where a third of work was secretly AI
dettol99perc · reddit · 2026-08-31
Amazon announced that Mechanical Turk will close on September 30 after 21 years. The platform, which Bezos once dubbed "artificial artificial intelligence," peaked with 500,000 workers performing tasks like image labeling for pennies, providing the training data for early AI models.
Ironically, the platform is now being displaced by the very models it helped train. A 2023 EPFL study revealed that between one-third and half of MTurk workers were already using LLMs to complete tasks. This created a recursive loop where humans pretended to be machines (the platform's design) while secretly using machines to do the work, leaving clients paying for "human judgment" that was actually model output. The author reflects on the transparency of this trade compared to explicit AI usage in video production and notes the loss of flexible income for hundreds of thousands of workers.
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