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The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

theguardian.com

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Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#31

Post by crististm »

davnn wrote: post #12
User23 wrote: post #9

AI is nonsense. Dijkstra was right. I'm not saying that silicon/mechanical intelligence isn't possible. I'm unaware of any physical law that precludes it. But what we currently call "AI" is just the pathetic fallacy run wild. All that said, multidimensional data-driven linear recognizers are pretty impressive.

> AI is nonsense. Dijkstra was right. Define AI first. One of the first few lines on Wikipedia about AI: The scope of AI is disputed: as machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered as requiring "intelligence" are often removed from the definition, a phenomenon known as the AI effect, leading to the quip, "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."

How about this (incomplete) one: the ability to learn a subject at hand and then to apply this knowledge into another field.

For example, the machine becomes a master chess player then uses this ability to become a master at backgammon.

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#32

Post by User23 »

ybrah wrote: post #28
User23 wrote: post #9

AI is nonsense. Dijkstra was right. I'm not saying that silicon/mechanical intelligence isn't possible. I'm unaware of any physical law that precludes it. But what we currently call "AI" is just the pathetic fallacy run wild. All that said, multidimensional data-driven linear recognizers are pretty impressive.

AI => machine learning => automated statistics

Rendered in English: Automated statistics is a consequence of machine learning. Machine learning is a consequence of AI.

I don't understand your point. Please explain.

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#33

Post by crististm »

yorwba wrote: post #21
User23 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that intelligence is more than quantifiable. Von Neumann machines, no matter how complex, will never achieve intelligence. Again, to be completely clear, I’m not claiming machine intelligence is impossible, just that what we see presently isn’t it in any honest sense.

What do you even mean by "Von Neumann machines, no matter how complex, will never achieve intelligence."? If you mean machines that self-replicate, then there're plenty counterexamples around already ( https://www.xkcd.com/387/ ). If you mean computers using the von Neumann architecture, then that's weirdly specific, since modern computers are at best vaguely inspired by that model, and GPUs in particular work very d…

How is self-replication a requirement for intelligence?

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#34

Post by davnn »

crististm wrote: post #31
davnn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is nonsense. Dijkstra was right. Define AI first. One of the first few lines on Wikipedia about AI: The scope of AI is disputed: as machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered as requiring "intelligence" are often removed from the definition, a phenomenon known as the AI effect, leading to the quip, "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."

How about this (incomplete) one: the ability to learn a subject at hand and then to apply this knowledge into another field. For example, the machine becomes a master chess player then uses this ability to become a master at backgammon.

That's called transfer learning in ML and we are not very good at it, yet.

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#35

Post by duggan »

hyperrail wrote: post #3

Not quite on topic, but I can't help noticing the overused word "quietly" in the title of the story: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/tech-news-sites-quietly-rely-w... (This is a rare case where the word might be appropriate, though!)

Glad to see other people also find it annoying.

I went searching to see if someone had written about the phenomenon last year, but eventually concluded I was probably mad. Thanks!

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#36

Post by User23 »

crististm wrote: post #33
yorwba wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you even mean by "Von Neumann machines, no matter how complex, will never achieve intelligence."? If you mean machines that self-replicate, then there're plenty counterexamples around already ( https://www.xkcd.com/387/ ). If you mean computers using the von Neumann architecture, then that's weirdly specific, since modern computers are at best vaguely inspired by that model, and GPUs in particular work very d…

How is self-replication a requirement for intelligence?

I charitably assume he's drawing from the fact that all true intelligences we can observe are capable of self-replication.

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#37

Post by dataflow »

yorwba wrote: post #16
mehrdadn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some examples of companies claiming to use AI but instead actually using human workers?

Mentioned in the article: Edison Software, Spinvox, X.ai, Clara, Expensify, Facebook.

No... maybe I wasn't clear on this, but the article doesn't claim those companies do what I asking:

- Edison Software: Their complaint is that engineers went some users' personal emails to "improve" a feature, and that this was a privacy violation. This is not addressing what I was asking. To me this means their AI really is doing the work by default, but that in cases where the AI doesn't behave well, they have humans intervene. Moreover, it's not clear to me that they ever claimed the work was fully AI-driven in the first place.

- Spinvox: Again, same thing: "The ratio of humans to messages and humans to number of users is very, very low."

- X.ai: I can't view the link behind a paywall so I don't know what their case was.

- Clara: same as X.ai

- Expensify: Again, same as Spinvox and Edison Software: "Expensify admitted that it had been using humans to transcribe at least some of the receipts it claimed to process using its “smartscan technology”."

- Facebook: Did Facebook actually claim M was entirely AI-powered? The fact that humans were used isn't enough to answer my question of whether they were "claiming to use AI but instead actually using human workers".

Note that I'm NOT defending these practices by any means, or suggesting that they're not privacy violations. All I'm saying is they don't answer my question, which was entirely about the use of AI, not about privacy violations.

To hopefully clarify what I was looking for: I was looking for examples of companies that are explicitly advertising that their services are AI-powered, but actually using humans to do the heavy-lifting. Meaning I'm looking for a company that does much more than have humans go through user data to improve its existing AI or handle edge-cases. That humans sometimes occasionally become involved at some points to improve service is not enough -- the company needs to be more or less pretty-much-actively-lying about their use of AI when the work is being delegated to human workers. (I asked for examples of this because this seemed to be the criterion the parent comment had.)

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#38

Post by _up »

vtange wrote: post #11
xamuel wrote: post #7

Absolutely unsurprising given the current state of hype. How to get rich: (A) Start a page that applies photoshop effects to user-uploaded pictures. (B) Secretly accomplish A using low-paid grunts. (C) Claim it's done with AI, obtain a billion dollars of VC money

At this rate every company should just start claiming their workers are human-lookalike cyborgs since being a plain-old honest company who doesn't lie about using human workers doesn't get the same boost as one using human workers but claiming the "AI" treatment.

I think another big reason is people expect near perfection from a professional Human powered service but might be much more forgiving when the service is thought to be done by AI.

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#39

Post by crististm »

davnn wrote: post #34
crististm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this (incomplete) one: the ability to learn a subject at hand and then to apply this knowledge into another field. For example, the machine becomes a master chess player then uses this ability to become a master at backgammon.

That's called transfer learning in ML and we are not very good at it, yet.

Almost there! Have you seen Feynman talking that knowing the birds' names doesn't mean you know anything about them?

Let's see how the machine learns about the concept of transfer learning in the first place :)

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#40

Post by ekianjo »

davnn wrote: post #12
User23 wrote: post #9

AI is nonsense. Dijkstra was right. I'm not saying that silicon/mechanical intelligence isn't possible. I'm unaware of any physical law that precludes it. But what we currently call "AI" is just the pathetic fallacy run wild. All that said, multidimensional data-driven linear recognizers are pretty impressive.

> AI is nonsense. Dijkstra was right. Define AI first. One of the first few lines on Wikipedia about AI: The scope of AI is disputed: as machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered as requiring "intelligence" are often removed from the definition, a phenomenon known as the AI effect, leading to the quip, "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."

> "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."

If you can't replicate what a human do, it's not AI. The fact that we can only beat humans for very, very narrow applications/games and that we don't have a generalized model for learning is a clear failure of the AI hype.

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