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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

#121

Post by User23 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #65
ekianjo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I know about AGI but I dont like that term because it implies that the classifiers we have nowadays are good enough to be called "intelligence". They are just statistical models with great number of layers, nothing else.

Your description ("statistical models with great number of layers") tells me you're talking about neural networks. However, we have "nowadays" many classifiers that are not neural networks and therefore have no layers of any sort, like SVMs, KNN or logistic regression and are not even statistical, like decision trees/forests. I should also point out that literally all the classifiers "we have nowadays" as per your co…

Peter Norvig's Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp is a good read too.

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

#122

Post by User23 »

kyle-rb wrote: post #115
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…

You're using Von Neumann machine in the sense of a self-replicating machine. I think the commenter you're replying to meant Von Neumann architecture, which is the basic layout of a computer, and has nothing to do with self-replication. See this Wikipedia disambiguation page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_machine

Thanks for clarifying. The man was such a polymath and has made so many contributions I should have been more clear myself.

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

#123

Post by nradov »

deepGem wrote: post #93

Am glad this is highlighted now. Back in 2015, when we wanted to build an meeting scheduling bot, we naively thought we could use only machines to get the job done. 3 months later we realized that was no way feasible, not then not in the next 10 years. So the common feedback we got was to just use low cost labor in India/Phillipines to get the job done. To us, that was a no-go because we kept privacy as the top crite…

Could you expand upon the technical problems you ran into? I would have thought it possible to build a reasonably good meeting scheduling bot with just classical constrained optimization algorithms (no AI / ML), but I'm probably missing something.

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

#124

Post by pm24601 »

It was my understanding that all AI technology/approaches need some sort of training. And that this training required some sort of human intervention to grade "correctness"

In companies that I have worked for that want to use AI; they always have a clause in the privacy agreement allowing employees to look at users' content in order to determine how well the algorithm was doing.

There are some differences: 1. PII was redacted (to the extent possible); 2. Customer could opt-out.; 3. the AI wasn't core to the service.

That said - sci-fi AI does seem to require humans behind the curtain.

Personally, I am more comfortable with a human being my virtual "AI" assistant than I am with real AI. I feel a human is less likely to make a mistake that will cause me personal damage, there is more responsibility/liability to doing a good job.

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

#125

Post by pm24601 »

nostrademons wrote: post #103

A lot of this comes from the availability of cheap hype-driven capital. The way it's supposed to work is that AI lets you replace expensive human labor with cheap computers so that a job that might've cost $10 in wages instead costs $0.0001 in server time. The way it actually works is that you tell a bunch of investors that you've got an AI that reduces the cost of X by a factor of 10,000, they give you $100M in capi…

It's working for Uber...still waiting for those autonomous taxis that don't run people over....

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

#126

Post by pm24601 »

mirimir wrote: post #61
_up wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe. But I believe that concern about privacy is the main issue. If you trust some firm with your data, you also trust their data systems. And their staff. But if they're giving your data to numerous third parties, there's far more potential for leaks and malicious activity. This reminds me of NSA's argument that data collection and processing isn't illegal, because ... > According to USSID 18, a top-secret NSA man…

Yes because the NSA believes the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle applies to that data. Such data is simultaneously in the "collected"/"not-collected" state. It is only when the data is observed that it resolves its state.

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

#127

Post by pm24601 »

shawn wrote: post #53

See also: the front page of HN. You didn’t think that was an algorithm choosing which stories you see, did you? :) It works well. And considering how much effect HN has on our daily lives, it’s neat that the algorithm reduces to “this human has good taste.” I see no reason why HN won’t be around for decades. And that’s exciting. It’s the only newspaper that feels like a community. This used to feel strange — if you t…

Youtube's algorithm is designed to give the viewer stuff similar to what they have already seen. Be it Goto Conference videos, Nazi rants, or wacky people doing fingernail designs. Youtube's AI is not designed take chances and offer up something 'surprising'. 'Surprising' might be offensive not enlightening.

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

#128

Post by nradov »

pixl97 wrote: post #118
ekianjo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

A dog can't replicate what a human can do, therefore it's not intelligent, right? Intelligence is a spectrum, some of the things we have created are intelligent by the definition of the word. They are not human level intelligence, yet.

The things we have created aren't even at rodent level intelligence yet, never mind dogs.

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

#130

Post by vultour »

PretzelFisch wrote: post #92
vultour wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they handle bogus results from MTurk? I know people that tried to use it and had to stop because 95% of the "workers" just put meaningless data in hoping you don't notice and they get paid.

Couldn't you just solve that by sending the job to multiple workers and comparing the results?

That's an obvious solution, but you might start approaching a point where it's actually cheaper to hire a dedicated person for it.
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