crowdsourcing
Latest stories covering crowdsourcing, with summaries and links to related coverage.
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Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30
tool
4 min read
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that lets individuals and businesses outsource virtual work to a global, on-demand workforce available around the clock. Organizations can submit tasks through a user interface or API, dividing large manual projects into smaller internet-based microtasks completed by distributed workers on a pay-per-task basis. MTurk supports data validation, research, survey participation, content moderation, data deduplication, product and image categorization, and data collection from websites. Amazon positions the service as a way to handle repetitive manual work quickly, adjust workforce capacity without scaling an in-house team, and reduce the labor and overhead costs of managing temporary workers. For machine learning, MTurk can collect and annotate training data, support iterative model corrections, and provide human-in-the-loop feedback to validate and retrain models. Tasks can include drawing bounding boxes for computer-vision datasets when automation is insufficient and expert teams cannot process the volume alone. Allen Institute for AI engineering director Michael Schmitz said AI2 uses crowdsourcing platforms including MTurk to create human-annotated datasets for training systems and measuring AI progress. Food Genius executive director David Falck said workers gather menu, website, and other information to identify consumer insights and market trends.
Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk
news
2 min read
Amazon's Mechanical Turk will stop accepting new customers on July 30, 2026. Existing customers can continue to use the service, but no new features will be introduced.