Amazon is shutting down its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service to new customers, marking the end of an era for the platform that was once dubbed ‘Artificial Artificial Intelligence’. Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk allowed people to complete small tasks that were hard for machines, but its value has been undermined by the rise of language models and specialized vendors. Existing customers can still use the service, but it will no longer receive new features. This change reflects the shift in the AI industry towards more specialized and high-quality data annotation tools. Why it matters: the sunset of Mechanical Turk highlights the rapid evolution of the AI landscape, where human-generated data is increasingly being replaced by more efficient and accurate machine-generated alternatives.