Discussion summary
Amazon is ceasing new customer acceptance for Mechanical Turk, shifting workers to other automation projects. Discussions highlight the platform's role in human labeling and its replacement by newer services.
What the discussion says
- Some users believe MT was more effective than AI.
- Others mention the decline due to better alternatives.
- Concerns about finding participants for studies.
- Recognition of MT's historical significance.
“Mechanical Turk works better than any AI.”
“It's a shame. Mechanical Turk works better than any AI.”
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- Hacker News
- They moved all the Mechanical Turk workers over to robot and autotaxi piloting.by baggachipz
- And monitoring of “cashier-free” grocery stores.by teddyh
- It's a shame. Mechanical Turk works better than any AI.
- personally, i've never had good luck with MT's quality.by brokensegue
- It's still AI, just a different type.by xandrius
- Where do I find participants for my user studies then?by leohonexus
- Pour one out for the original A.I. (Actual Indians).by sampton
- This has very little to do with “AI replacing jobs” and much much more to do with a bad product getting obsoleted by better ones.
Human labeling is a two sided marketplace and so as any marketplace startup knows, both sides need to be constantly nurtured otherwise the system can collapse as worsening quality leads to churn and a vicious cycle that empties out the platform.
In labeling, you need to understand the limitations of individual work and fatigue, keep your pipeline bursting with awesome and consistent work, and improve the platform to make customer experience great.
AMT has been totally languishing in all these respects. Pay is terrible, dishonesty rampant, etc. It was a bad product, no need to pedestalize it or turn it political
by aabhay - I had no idea this was still around.
It helped me buy a Battlefield 2 "Special Forces" expansion pack back in the day.
Well, I could've bought it either way but buying it didn't impact my normal income because I did Mechanical Turk in my free time enough to get it.
by nullsmack - That was a fun DLC. The zip lines were my favorite on the night maps.by nirav72
- I can see a high value startup, that will provide Human Intelligence with real Humans, locked in the room, with no network, books, LLMs and monitored 24x7 with cameras.by root-parent
- I'd pay for authentic artisnal fresh prison-to-screen Trump Truths produced that way.by DonHopkins
- Prison labor for the rescue!by weregiraffe
- 24/7 isolation with no stimulation outside of work? Wonder if the hallucination rate would be higher or lowerby mcmcmc
- I'd suggest first looking into the conditions that enable humans to generate sustained, high quality output.by eli
- Please enjoy each task equally
- I turked for a bit trying to make some extra cash leading up to my wedding, but it was a very time-inefficient way to make money. I think I managed to wring 10 or 20 bucks out of it tops after plugging at it for a month.by jordemort
- Maybe the most unambiguous "ai will automate work" example I've seen yet.
Absolutely does not imply the workers are automated since they can now use the current models to do more complex tasks at the vast number of new AI training data startups.
Turk was simply not designed for greater complexity tasks and so much of their lunch has been eaten by startups specifically built to collect AI training data.
by obblekk - Back around 10 years ago, I gained a new manager who had previously managed mechanical turk. It was already recognised as a dead end back then.
I remember him talking about getting a mandate from Amazon Security to upgrade from the long EOL MySQL 4.0 to MySQL 5.something, and that it was almost impossible to get any resources committed from leadership to even do it despite the fact it was security requiring it (which usually resulted in everyone jumping before stopping to ask how high to jump). I want to say he ended up doing it himself? Something like that..
All existing extremely minimal headcount was tied up in a massive technical debt of KTLO work, and proposals to resolve those issues similarly met resourcing road-blocks.
by Twirrim - > 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,
I assume AI use by workers has risen to the point where it renders Mechanical Turk pointless.
by CodesInChaos - I don't see why I would care how they do the job. Just do the job, I have other things to do.by 6510
- Yeah, I was doing this kind of Artificial Artificial Artificial Intelligence back in 2012 to make some extra $$$. Glad they finally "patched" that hole ^^.by moralestapia
- I guess that’s the dead internet theory. People are trying to train llms using mt, but just training on itself.by unparagoned
- This likely means those consuming the outputs of Mechanical Turk don't have a good way to measure the value (aka quality) of the outputs.
If they did - then they shouldn't care whether it's a human or a LLM. And if it's a LLM - then the cost will roughly correlate to the MIN(cost of the LLM, cost of a human) to do the task.
by skt5