Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

亚马逊将停止接受 Mechanical Turk 的新客户

These may be the last days of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. An announcement on the Mechanical Turk website says that on July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will close to new customers. Amazon Web Services says the decision was made after “careful consideration,” adding, “Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal. AWS continues to invest in security and availability improvements for Mechanical Turk, but we do not plan to introduce new features.”

这可能是亚马逊 Mechanical Turk 的最后时光了。Mechanical Turk 网站发布公告称，该众包服务将于 2026 年 7 月 30 日起停止接受新客户。亚马逊云科技（AWS）表示，这一决定是经过“慎重考虑”后做出的，并补充道：“现有客户可以继续正常使用该服务。AWS 将继续投资于 Mechanical Turk 的安全性和可用性改进，但我们不打算引入任何新功能。”

In other words, Amazon isn’t completely pulling the plug, but the service is very much on life support. First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid tiny amounts to perform simple tasks that resisted full automation — things like completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying the basic sentiment in a sentence.

换句话说，亚马逊并没有完全关停该服务，但它实际上已处于“生命维持”状态。Mechanical Turk 于 2005 年首次推出，是一个众包平台，人们可以通过完成一些难以完全自动化的简单任务（如完成验证码挑战或识别句子的基本情感）来获得微薄的报酬。

In its heyday, the service was at the center of debates around the ethics of crowdsourced labor, and it even played a small role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. Beginning in 2018, Amazon began billing it as a way for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service.

在鼎盛时期，该服务曾处于有关众包劳工伦理辩论的中心，甚至在 Facebook-剑桥分析公司丑闻的早期阶段也扮演过一个小角色。从 2018 年开始，亚马逊将其定位为企业标注数据以训练神经网络的工具，作为其 SageMaker AI 服务的一部分。

Mechanical Turk has also been described as the hidden enabler for companies taking a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach to AI, where products marketed as AI are actually powered by the Mechanical Turk workforce — all the more fitting since the original Mechanical Turk was itself a hoax, with a hidden human chess player pretending to be a chess-playing machine.

Mechanical Turk 也被描述为那些在人工智能领域采取“先假装成功，再真正实现”策略的公司的幕后推手。许多标榜为 AI 的产品，实际上是由 Mechanical Turk 的劳动力在背后支撑的——这显得格外讽刺，因为最初的“土耳其机器人”（Mechanical Turk）本身就是一个骗局，是一个躲在机器里的真人棋手在假装成会下棋的机器。

Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI models grew even more complicated. In a snake-eating-its-own-tail irony, a 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform were using large language models to complete their tasks, raising questions about the reliability of data annotated on the platform and also about whether humans needed to be in the loop at all.

随着时间的推移，Mechanical Turk 与 AI 模型之间的关系变得更加复杂。一项 2023 年的分析发现了一个“蛇吞尾”式的讽刺现象：该平台上 33% 到 46% 的工作者正在使用大语言模型来完成任务，这引发了人们对平台标注数据可靠性的质疑，同时也让人怀疑是否还有必要让人类参与其中。

This week, after Amazon’s decision became public, one Reddit user suggested the platform died “years ago,” with workers and researchers abandoning it due to bots and fraud. The user predicted, “Someone at Amazon is going to decide keeping the Mturk servers running is a waste of time and resources and pull the plug entirely.”

本周，在亚马逊的决定公开后，一位 Reddit 用户表示该平台“多年前”就已经死了，因为机器人和欺诈行为导致工人和研究人员纷纷弃用。该用户预测：“亚马逊内部迟早会有人认为维持 Mturk 服务器的运行是在浪费时间和资源，从而彻底关停它。”