3 min read
For twenty years, Amazon ran a service called Mechanical Turk: a digital piecework marketplace where people around the world were paid a few cents a task to label images, sort data and check text, the invisible human grunt-work that trained the machine-learning systems now sold to you as “artificial intelligence”. As of 30 July, Amazon is closing it to new customers. The reason is as bleak as it is tidy: the AI those workers spent two decades training can now do their jobs, so Amazon no longer needs the workers. The people who built the engine are being marched off the premises by the engine.
“Artificial artificial intelligence”, and who actually paid for it
Amazon did not even bother to hide the con. It marketed the thing as “artificial artificial intelligence”: software that looked slick and automated to the paying client, while underneath sat a vast, distributed crowd of underpaid humans clicking as fast as their broadband would allow. For nearly two decades those people were the actual product. Amazon paid them a pittance, credited them nowhere, and let the entire industry congratulate the machine for work that a person in the Philippines or rural Ohio had done for the price of a coffee. It was one of the great magic tricks of the tech era, and the people crammed inside the box got a few cents a click for the honour of being made to vanish.
The circular cruelty of it
Follow the loop, because it is genuinely vicious. Those workers labelled the images that taught the models to see, checked the text that taught them to read, and tidied the data that taught them to answer. Now those same models do the piecework faster and cheaper, so demand for the human labour has cratered, and Amazon waves its old clients toward SageMaker Ground Truth, where the machine writes the labels and a human merely checks them. The worker trained the replacement, the replacement took the job, and the worker gets a few final months as its poorly-paid proofreader before the door.
The warning shot came a couple of years back, when a 2023 study found that between a third and a half of Turk workers were already using large language models to blast through their own tasks. People were feeding the machine to keep pace with the machine, on a piece rate that made doing it by hand financially insane. There is no gentler way to read that: a workforce sharpening the very wood-chipper it was about to be fed into, one task at a time.
Spare a thought, then do what Amazon did and move on
It is tempting to file this under “old platform sunsets, who cares, next”. But a great many people leaned on this work for real, if miserable, income, and one of the founding pillars of the online gig economy has just been kicked away by the single company that built it, profited from it most, and is now automating it into the ground. Specialised human judgement still has a berth, for now. The low-value clicking that kept a lot of households one bad month from the edge is the first clean casualty of the thing it built. Amazon, no doubt, will mark the occasion with a statement about its deep commitment to people, presumably drafted by the software that replaced them.
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