I assume AI use by workers has risen to the point where it renders Mechanical Turk pointless.

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.

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.

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.

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