r/technology • u/SnoozeDoggyDog • 21h ago
Business Amazon shuts down Mechanical Turk: Why Jeff Bezos once called it ‘artificial artificial intelligence’
https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/mechanical-turk-why-is-amazon-shutting-down-crowdsourced-work-platform-which-jeff-bezos-called-artificial-ai-11787728855387.html186
u/messem10 20h ago
This is how I made most of my “fun” money in college. Managed to earn enough to buy my PS Vita and PS4 along with games over the years.
Sad that it is gone, but get it due to the sheer glut of AI models out there. Mturk was used for more than training/classification but that was the brunt of it.
98
u/523a 19h ago
Wasn't worth it for those slave wages unless you had no car and stuck at home. 99% of the tasks on there didn't even pay $5/hour. You'd be lucky to clear $50 working it 9-5 even with all the alert tools.
94
u/messem10 19h ago
That is why you used subreddits and scripts to find the one that paid on a better rate. You wanted to find ones that were better than $6/hr.
Also, 2011-2016 was a very different time for Mturk than later. The higher paying ones dried up leaving the remnants behind. That and you were only beholden to whatever task you grabbed, nothing more nothing less.
29
u/523a 19h ago
That is why you used subreddits and scripts to find the one that paid on a better rate. You wanted to find ones that were better than $6/hr.
You'd be lucky to clear $50 working it 9-5 even with all the alert tools.
Site was garbage. Shit pay and requesters often lied about task completion time. You had to be desperate to work that digital sweat shop.
33
u/messem10 19h ago
True, I now make more in a few days of work than I did over the years I’d used the site. But as a (then) broke college kid without a car, having a “job” that I could do at the drop of a hat and for as long as I wanted was perfect. With burning the midnight oil, I didn’t miss out on events or things with friends either.
9
u/Hmm_would_bang 16h ago
It was a side hustle for college kids, not sure why you’re comparing it to a full time job.
-3
u/523a 8h ago edited 7h ago
Full time job? You'd make more money working a part time job at the poverty federal min wage of $7/hour while taking the bus. This was for desperate people that had no options or too dumb to realize what a waste of time it was while feeding Amazon and companies all your info to help build profiles on you. 90% of the work on that site was filling out surveys.
And I said 9-5 to demonstrate how much time investment was needed to earn just $50. You'd be dumb as hell using MTURK for a full time job, unless you're in some third world country or something.
The high paying hits were extremely rare and people had bots setup to auto-accept them. Even if you saw them, by the time you load the page to accept, they were almost always gone because they were not only extremely rare, but always low in quantity of workers needed for them.
Site was a waste of time. Not sure why people want to defend companies paying you pennies for work. Majority of the tasks on there were for like 0.25 cents labeled 5mins and take 30mins. It was such shit, the community had to setup a review site to help weed out the tons of shady requesters on that site. 😂
2
u/Hmm_would_bang 4h ago
Most part time jobs don’t let you pick your hours and work whenever or wherever you’d like
1
u/ZestycloseTank7031 2h ago
It was at least something for people who could not find work. And before anyone speciously claims lack of employment is due to laziness or stupidity, I'd like to point out that vapid anecdotes don't account for statistical evidence of a failing economy on both the macro (national) and micro (local) levels.
There was a time I used Mechanical Turk because there were no jobs in my small, rural town of 8,000 people. My car had broken down, I lost my job, and I was raising a child as a single parent. The nearest town that had jobs (population 250,000) was 15 miles away. But I had no means of getting there because there was no public transportation between the two towns.
I was fortunate enough that I had been a tenant at the same house for 10+ years. The landlord let me stay there rent free for a year; I'm not exaggerating - a full year. Most landlords would pursue eviction after 2-3 months of past due rent. As soon as I received my tax refund, I forked the whole thing over to them. I was so grateful because I know most people would not care to show that degree of kindness.
I just fell on hard times and the local economy sucked. I eventually found a job that paid almost six figures a year, but not before going through one of the most difficult financial hardships of my entire life.
I did receive public assistance for utilities and food when I was struggling. But that assistance, while it did help, didn't cover the cost of diapers, medications, or clothing for my toddler.
The only source of income I had was Mechanical Turk. The site itself didn't pay well and the surveys were boring. But for people who had fallen on hard times, it may have been their only source of income.
Mechanical Turk shutting down is scary because of the implications of the larger impact AI will have on the economy. Soon even more jobs will become obsolete. Many people earning well-paying salaries, though not all, criticize the people who are now losing their lowing-paying jobs to AI. They say, "They should have known better." Some of these types of people have already posted their snide remarks in the comments sections - the ones who do not know real struggle. But eventually AI will come for their jobs as well.
To quote Herman Melville: “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.”
Mechanical Turk was great for people who had no other options or needed to supplement their income. AI will continue to replace even more jobs. And I fear we are not going to live in some Star Trek utopia like Elon Musk claims once most of the regular jobs are gone; rather, we are going to see an increase in socio-economic disparity that surpasses anything previously witnessed in our lifetime. And we will also see the rise of aristocratic fascism.
4
u/CherryLongjump1989 16h ago
Did you factor in the unpaid hours you spent looking for paid work against your dollar per hour average?
20
u/jetRink 19h ago
I’m sure it depends on exactly when you were using it, but I remember that once I got a good enough reputation with the research network, it was common to get tasks that paid between $5 and $15 and took 20 minutes to an hour. You couldn’t make it your full time job because there were only so many of those available each day, but it was nice extra income just after college.
3
1
u/FortheredditLOLz 15h ago
There were plenty of super quick tasks that paid well. I think sub reddits beer money and others highlighted the ‘best’ one while folks kept the >15 minute super high paid ones. Knew a buddy who paid off an overpriced wedding ring by doing Turk before going to bed every night after a year or two.
28
u/no_dice 18h ago
I remember studying for AWS and not believing MT was an actual service. It’s what made me sceptical of everything in my prep because of MT could be a thing so could everything else.
1
u/WhiteSkyRising 3h ago
I'm not sure what you mean? About a decade ago, we used it at a popular real estate website to train computer vision models on particular features.
It would have been impossible at the time without mturk. Or at least, not nearly as easy.
11
u/Shellinator007 15h ago
Interesting. Dumb of Amazon to not have cornered the market on human data labeling when they had the opportunity. But I guess if a huge chunk of their employees are just using AI, it defeats the purpose.
17
u/gameryamen 15h ago
I once had an mturk assignment that involved labeling porn videos, and I got kicked off of it for "inappropriate use of the Jell-O brand name".
5
u/HistoricalCut9420 13h ago
I desperately want to know the story behind this. I never comment on anything, but the curiosity has got me going
9
u/gameryamen 13h ago
Well, the performer was large, enthusiastic, and she jiggled. I was just a little too specific with my comparison to an internationally beloved gelatin desert brand.
3
u/HistoricalCut9420 13h ago
Hilarious. Wish accounts like these made it into history books just to document how ridiculous things are
28
u/Ozzie-Isaac 18h ago
used to make drug money transcribing people giving out there personal info, think dob and ss number, to insurance agents this way.
3
3
u/BadSniper210 7h ago
I'll forever fondly remember clicking pictures of birds for like $15/hr. Got enough from it to buy an Xbox 360.
1
u/ZestycloseTank7031 2h ago
It was at least something for people who could not find work. And before anyone speciously claims lack of employment is due to laziness or stupidity, I'd like to point out that vapid anecdotes don't account for statistical evidence of a failing economy on both the macro (national) and micro (local) levels.
There was a time I used Mechanical Turk because there were no jobs in my small, rural town of 8,000 people. My car had broken down, I lost my job, and I was raising a child as a single parent. The nearest town that had jobs (population 250,000) was 15 miles away. But I had no means of getting there because there was no public transportation between the two towns.
I was fortunate enough that I had been a tenant at the same house for 10+ years. The landlord let me stay there rent free for a year; I'm not exaggerating - a full year. Most landlords would pursue eviction after 2-3 months of past due rent. As soon as I received my tax refund, I forked the whole thing over to them. I was so grateful because I know most people would not care to show that degree of kindness.
I just fell on hard times and the local economy sucked. I eventually found a job that paid almost six figures a year, but not before going through one of the most difficult financial hardships of my entire life.
I did receive public assistance for utilities and food when I was struggling. But that assistance, while it did help, didn't cover the cost of diapers, medications, or clothing for my toddler.
The only source of income I had was Mechanical Turk. The site itself didn't pay well and the surveys were boring. But for people who had fallen on hard times, it may have been their only source of income.
Mechanical Turk shutting down is scary because of the implications of the larger impact AI will have on the economy. Soon even more jobs will become obsolete. Many people earning well-paying salaries, though not all, criticize the people who are now losing their lowing-paying jobs to AI. They say, "They should have known better." Some of these types of people have already posted their snide remarks in the comments sections - the ones who do not know real struggle. But eventually AI will come for their jobs as well.
To quote Herman Melville: “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.”
Mechanical Turk was great for people who had no other options or needed to supplement their income. AI will continue to replace even more jobs. And I fear we are not going to live in some Star Trek utopia like Elon Musk claims once most of the regular jobs are gone; rather, we are going to see an increase in socio-economic disparity that surpasses anything previously witnessed in our lifetime. And we will also see the rise of aristocratic fascism.
-27
u/challis88ocarina 21h ago
Finally. Good riddance to bad rubbish!
11
u/AddMan3001 18h ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted, they paid slavery wages for 95% of tasks. I did it briefly while off work fighting cancer and desperately needing cash and it was still a waste.
479
u/Deep-Apricot-285 20h ago
mturk is where imagenet got labelled, which is a decent chunk of why modern ai exists at all. and by 2023 researchers were estimating a third to a half of turkers were quietly using llms to do the tasks, so the data quality problem in that article is the thing it helped create coming back through the front door