Amazon Assigns Mechanical Turk Workers One Final Task: Confirm the AI Has Learned Correctly

SEATTLE— Amazon announced this week that Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourcing platform that spent two decades paying human workers fractions of a cent to label images, transcribe audio, and classify data used as training material for the AI systems now displacing them, will stop accepting new customers on July 30 and has entered what the company describes as a "maintenance phase."

To mark the transition, Amazon has queued a final Human Intelligence Task for its remaining pool of approximately 500,000 active contractors: a 15-image labeling exercise, estimated to take 47 seconds and paying $0.03, asking workers to verify that an AI model has correctly identified the contents of the images.

Workers who complete the task within 14 days will receive a digital badge on their MTurk profile and be entered into a drawing for a $100 Amazon gift card, redeemable on Amazon.com. Workers who do not complete the task will receive a $0.00 completion bonus, consistent with historical platform norms.

Mechanical Turk launched in 2005 under the branding "Artificial Artificial Intelligence" — a reference to the humans performing tasks computers could not — and became the dominant labor market for what researchers later termed "ghost work": gig contractors performing micro-tasks at wages independently estimated to average between $2 and $6 per hour. The datasets they produced were subsequently used to train machine learning systems at technology companies including Amazon, which has not publicly connected the two facts.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. The automated email informing workers of the shutdown was signed "The Amazon Mechanical Turk Team."

"I've been on the platform since 2009," said one worker who asked not to be identified. "I labeled a lot of stop signs. I completed the task. The AI got them all right."