“We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments,” a notice posted to the Mechanical Turk, or MTurk, website said. “Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026.”
Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk matches legions of workers with simple digital jobs, or “Human Intelligence Tasks,” that typically pay out a few cents per task. They include labeling data, transcribing audio or video or answering surveys.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos described the service as “artificial artificial intelligence,” as it farmed out tasks that could be easily completed by humans but proved too challenging for computers.
In its heyday, Mechanical Turk was a great way for visualization folks to gather data for specific tasks from real people. Kind of sad to see it shutdown, but so it goes on the internet.
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics (2nd Edition)
