Mechanical Turk Is Dead. AI Didn’t Replace the Humans—It Just Hid Them.
Amazon is pulling the plug on Mechanical Turk on September 30. While it feels like AI has finally automated away microtasks, the truth is much darker. The human judgment underpinning AI didn’t disappear—it was swallowed by proprietary, siloed training pipelines. We are losing visibility into the ghost labor that powers our algorithms.