The platform increasingly struggled as AI use grew, though.
Amazon is closing a platform that became a staple for some gig workers.
The company will shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, according to a message posted on the crowdsourced work platform's website on Tuesday.
"We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments," the message reads. Last month, Amazon stopped accepting new users for the service.
Amazon started Mechanical Turk — called "MTurk" by frequent users — in 2005. The company initially designed the tool to cut duplicate product listings as it sold a wider range of items, The New York Times reported in 2019.
Mechanical Turk eventually became an external tool as well to pay humans to do tasks that computers could not, such as transcribe audio recordings. MTurk also became a favorite among researchers who needed survey data, as well as at least one presidential campaign .
Mechanical Turk became popular with gig workers, who were paid as little as a few cents per task but had more flexibility to work where and when they wanted compared to a traditional job. The platform included more than 500,000 workers at its peak.
Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos called the service "artificial artificial intelligence" in a 2007 article in The New York Times.
These days, real artificial intelligence has taken on many of the tasks that Mechanical Turk was designed to help with. And while Amazon touted MTurk as a tool for developing machine learning, many AI training efforts now focus on real-world data sets.
There's also evidence that MTurk and AI were converging: One 2023 study estimated that between 33% and 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used large-language models to complete tasks on the platform.
Gig workers are now completing similar tasks for companies that train AI, with companies like Uber getting in on the action with data-labeling gigs.
There's even a market for merely selling data or documents to AI training companies.
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