Amazon is shutting down a go-to option for gig workers. It's the latest casualty of AI growth.

Amazon is shutting down a go-to option for gig workers. It's the latest casualty of AI growth. Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk as of September 30. Bloomberg/Getty Images Amazon is closing a platform that became a staple for some gig workers.The company will shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, according to a message posted on the crowdsourced work platform's website on Tuesday."We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments," the message reads. Last month, Amazon stopped accepting new users for the service.Amazon started Mechanical Turk — called "MTurk" by frequent users — in 2005. The company initially designed the tool to cut duplicate product listings as it sold a wider range of items, The New York Times reported in 2019.Mechanical Turk eventually became an external tool as well to pay humans to do tasks that computers could not, such as transcribe audio recordings. MTurk also became a favorite among researchers who needed survey data, as well as at least one presidential campaign.Mechanical Turk became popular with gig workers, who were paid as little as a few cents per task but had more flexibility to work where and when they wanted compared to a traditional job. The platform included more than 500,000 workers at its peak.Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos called the service "artificial artificial intelligence" in a 2007 article in The New York Times.These days, real artificial intelligence has taken on many of the tasks that Mechanical Turk was designed to help with. And while Amazon touted MTurk as a tool for developing machine learning, many AI training efforts now focus on real-world data sets.There's also evidence that MTurk and AI were converging: One 2023 study estimated that between 33% and 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used large-language models to complete tasks on the platform. Gig workers are now completing similar tasks for companies that train AI, with companies like Uber getting in on the action with data-labeling gigs.There's even a market for merely selling data or documents to AI training companies.Do you have a story idea about gig work? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. Read next Alex Bitter is a senior retail reporter covering the gig economy, food, and retail. His work focuses major gig delivery and ride-hailing apps, including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Walmart's Spark. He is interested in everything from what it's like to work on the apps to the companies' business strategies.Some of his recent stories feature gig workers who have been deactivated on the apps, DoorDash hiring traditional employees to make deliveries, gig workers' use of bots, and gig work expanding into new professions, such as nursing.Alex has also written about Aldi's US expansion, Starbucks' turnaround efforts, and the fallout from Kraft-Heinz's budget cutting. Convenience store chain Sheetz ended its "smile policy" after his reporting.Before joining Insider in September 2020, he wrote about consumer and retail companies for S&P Global Market Intelligence. He's a graduate of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and grew up on the Big Island.Alex lives in the Washington, DC, area, where you can find him studying ancient coins or searching for Civil War artifacts with his metal detector in his free time.Got a tip? Reach out at abitter@businessinsider.com or via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (808) 854-4501. Amazon The AI Data Grab