Amazon is killing Mechanical Turk. By the end, a third of the humans on it were secretly using AI to do the work

Amazon announced this week that Mechanical Turk closes on September 30 after 21 years. Bezos originally called it "artificial artificial intelligence". the joke being that it handed humans the tasks computers couldn't do yet. 500 000 people at peak, a few cents a task, labelling images and transcribing audio.

Those labels trained the models. the models got good enough to do the labelling. the platform is now closing lol. But the part that got me is a 2023 EPFL study finding somewhere between a third and half of MTurk workers were already using LLMs to complete their tasks. so at the end you had humans pretending to be machines, on a platform designed to make humans look like machines, quietly using machines to do it. and the companies buying that work thought they were paying for human judgment.

Which raises something I can't resolve about my own work. I produce video with avatars instead of filming using different AI models such Argil and Seedance among many others and clients get a talking head that never existed. the honest version of what I sell is "this used to cost a filming day and now it doesn't," and everyone in the chain knows. MTurk's version was the same trade with the disclosure removed at every layer. Amazon selling human judgment as an API, workers selling model output as human judgment.

For me the tech was never the dishonest part, however the layer where someone stops saying what it is, that's the part. Anyway, 500 000 people had accessible flexible income and on September 30 they don't. that deserves more than a shrug about progress.