Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

josefritzishere

It's a shame. Mechanical Turk works better than any AI.

nullsmack

I had no idea this was still around. It helped me buy a Battlefield 2 "Special Forces" expansion pack back in the day. Well, I could've bought it either way but buying it didn't impact my normal income because I did Mechanical Turk in my free time enough to get it.

CodesInChaos

> In a snake-eating-its-own-tail irony, a 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform were using large language models to complete their tasks, I assume AI use by workers has risen to the point where it renders Mechanical Turk pointless.

baggachipz

They moved all the Mechanical Turk workers over to robot and autotaxi piloting.

root-parent

I can see a high value startup, that will provide Human Intelligence with real Humans, locked in the room, with no network, books, LLMs and monitored 24x7 with cameras.

obblekk

Maybe the most unambiguous "ai will automate work" example I've seen yet. Absolutely does not imply the workers are automated since they can now use the current models to do more complex tasks at the vast number of new AI training data startups. Turk was simply not designed for greater complexity tasks and so much of their lunch has been eaten by startups specifically built to collect AI training data.

leohonexus

Where do I find participants for my user studies then?

jordemort

I turked for a bit trying to make some extra cash leading up to my wedding, but it was a very time-inefficient way to make money. I think I managed to wring 10 or 20 bucks out of it tops after plugging at it for a month.

sampton

Pour one out for the original A.I. (Actual Indians).

aabhay

This has very little to do with “AI replacing jobs” and much much more to do with a bad product getting obsoleted by better ones. Human labeling is a two sided marketplace and so as any marketplace startup knows, both sides need to be constantly nurtured otherwise the system can collapse as worsening quality leads to churn and a vicious cycle that empties out the platform. In labeling, you need to understand the limitations of individual work and fatigue, keep your pipeline bursting with awesome and consistent work, and improve the platform to make customer experience great. AMT has been totally languishing in all these respects. Pay is terrible, dishonesty rampant, etc. It was a bad product, no need to pedestalize it or turn it political

Twirrim

Back around 10 years ago, I gained a new manager who had previously managed mechanical turk. It was already recognised as a dead end back then. I remember him talking about getting a mandate from Amazon Security to upgrade from the long EOL MySQL 4.0 to MySQL 5.something, and that it was almost impossible to get any resources committed from leadership to even do it despite the fact it was security requiring it (which usually resulted in everyone jumping before stopping to ask how high to jump). I want to say he ended up doing it himself? Something like that.. All existing extremely minimal headcount was tied up in a massive technical debt of KTLO work, and proposals to resolve those issues similarly met resourcing road-blocks.