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 shutting down crowdsourced work platform Mechanical Turk, it said on Tuesday.

Mechanical Turk became a favorite with gig workers who completed tasks to earn money.

The platform increasingly struggled as AI use grew, though.

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.