Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk after 21 years, quietly ending the human-powered platform

In many ways, the decades-old digital labor service presaged aspects of the modern AI era.

[Photo: yu_photo/Adobe Stock]

Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, or MTurk, after 21 years, ending one of the internet’s earliest marketplaces for invisible digital labor—as well as a platform that helped establish the human-data pipeline behind modern AI.

The company said Mechanical Turk will close on September 30, after an internal assessment. 

Amazon had........

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