Amazon Will Stop Accepting New Customers For Mechanical Turk

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: These may be the last days of Amazon's Mechanical Turk. An announcement on the Mechanical Turk website says that on July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will close to new customers. Amazon Web Services says the decision was made after "careful consideration," adding, "Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal. AWS continues to invest in security and availability improvements for Mechanical Turk, but we do not plan to introduce new features." In other words, Amazon isn't completely pulling the plug, but the service is very much on life support. Further reading: Horror Stories From Inside Amazon's Mechanical Turk (2020)

LLM Replacement?

[Luthair]

I wonder whether this indicates that people are replacing usage with LLMs. I don't have direct experience with mechanical Turk, but i assume since it relies on humans paid almost nothing the output won't be perfect thus is similar in quality to LLMs

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[ShanghaiBill]

LLMs and humans are both unreliable, but make different mistakes.

Use one to check the other.

Disclaimer: I have used Mechanical Turk many times, but not recently.

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[Njovich]

The problem cuts both ways for these sties, the people wanting the job done use LLM's, and many people doing the job also use LLM's and thus are effectively scamming the client if they are looking for human input.

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[igreaterthanu]

Exactly this. There are competing websites that do pay the workers a bit more, and have much better data. I think it is a combination of both of these factors. There is no room left for cheap human data - that is taken by LLMs.

AI comes for turks

[nospam007]

Like the PC came for typists.

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[Fly Swatter]

Um, the PC has a keyboard.. All they did was relabel the job from 'typist' to 'data entry'.

I'm surprised

[93 Escort Wagon]

I didn't realize Amazon's Mechanical Turk was still around.

But who's gonna drive Teslas now?

[kelzer]

I guess Tesla will have to hire their own remote drivers now, in order to continue the FSD charade. Hopefully they'll be better trained and remember my preferred routes for once.

Oh well

[Zerbey]

Honestly I thought they shut that thing down years ago. I stopped using it when it was completely taken over by bots and became impossible to find good paying jobs, but for a while I made some nice beer money on the side from it.