The end of AAAI

Amazon is ending Amazon Mechanical Turk which seems like a branding mistake of the same order as Google shutting down Google Reader and getting rid of the "I'm feeling lucky" button - but was probably obvious, given the state of AI.

Amazon Mechanical Turk, if you don't know what it is, is an API surface on top of anonymous crowd work, named after the historical fake chess automaton. Bezos called it "Artificial Artificial Intelligence" being micro-task work done by people offer up as an API that could have been AI-produced; except the AIs did not exist for it when MTurk launched.

Mechanical Turk has been extremely important in the history of AI being the main source of a lot of labels in early datasets like ImageNet.

Later we got to the problem of MTurk workers using AI to do the office work more quickly to make more money - which of course meant that the human verification datasets like ImageNet relied on went missing. A lovely term appeared for this - because you know had AIs standing in for people pretending to be robots - or what was called Artificial Artificial Artificial Intelligence.

These days specialist companies have taken over the bulk of the AI labor and the lack of control over quality inhering in Mechanical Turk probably required a depth to the management of the service that was unwarranted for Amazon to keep it running.

Why do I call it a branding mistake? It seems like the kind of very punk, clean service that was an emblem of a certain ruthlessness in thinking through consequences - just flaunting a certain capability to ship wild things.

Google - back in the day - was a librarian of the internet not a cesspool of bad shopping and AI answers and "I'm feeling luck" and the Reader experience were great signals that yes, this was indeed the identity of the company and a role they cared about. No more.

Rest In Pease AAAI.