Had some absolutely bizarre results from their attempt to integrate mturk with Bedrock's 'ground truth' thing as of a few months ago. Threw simple mnist digits recognition at it, see what the quality, timing, and cost was. Figured mnist digits was at this point trivial. Spent $10 and the accuracy was marginally better than guessing, completely unusable results. Was completely baffled, people were publishing peer reviewed research based on exclusively mturk results.

The only time I ever used it (as a turk?) was when Jim Gray went missing at sea and satellite imagery of vast regions of the pacific were fed through Mechanical Turk. Seems a trivial problem now, but was not then, and needed humans to take a look.

I used it to have people transcribe my dad’s handwritten letters and journals. It was touching to get notes from a “Turk” saying how much she enjoyed his travels and following the cast of characters in his life!

Surprised Amazon managed to fumble mechanical turk at the same time Mercor/Scale and all these other companies started hiring humans to do data labeling tasks.

I was literally wondering this morning if mturk was still around! I assumed a lot of the stuff could just be done with LLMs and OCI now.

I made a couple thousand dollars off it squeezing in tasks here and there between meetings. Amazon Payments were challenging to redeem as I recall. I did more or less write the bulk of someone’s doctoral thesis. Kept giving me a dollar to summarize the findings of various psychology papers. The most memorable was the one where people were put in a room and someone sprayed “liquid ass” on the wall. The subjects given no explanation experienced higher levels of anxiety than those that were told there was a sewage leak being repaired. One of the strangest dollars I ever made. My PS4 and game collection was spectacular.

I wouldn't be surprised if Fiverr and Upwork start pulling back too. There's just so much AI bots now that have flooded the task marketplace.

End of an era.

I wonder why.