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AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

sixthtone.com

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Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#71

Post by justtopost »

sesqu wrote: post #57
blensor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company that needs to be protected from the market to be successful in this very same market, isn't this a fallacy? Trying to create a startup that can't at least compete with the existing solutions isn't a very good business strategy in my opinion. That's what academia is for. Research that is still too far away from being profitable but that has it's merits in the long run.

The claim is that there may be a market for AI-powered technologies, but that market is suppressed by non-AI competitors exploiting information asymmetry.

Wouldn't that suggest however that AI is not the best tool for the job? AI should be the great equalizer if the tech actually was useful, but I have seen precious few examples. The usual triumphs are almost all actually human sourced and then delivered by algo. (google image, etc.)

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#72

Post by cuboidGoat »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #63
sorokod wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life is messy an there are grey areas. That doesn't mean that the abstract concept has no meaning at all, Theranos is an example.

Sure, but as a society we've already legitimized lying, in form of e.g. ad industry, and at the same time, we're in total denial of that fact. I regret my parents never taught me we're living in softly adversarial world. People are not going to kill you, but businesses are out to fleece you.

Tell me about it. That point when you realise that fiction and comedy really are not exaggerating all that much, if at all.

"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." - Groucho Marx

See also; the appointed Liars of the Zoon tribe of Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#73

Post by seanmcdirmid »

paradite wrote: post #30
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are pretty stereotypical ad hominems, actually. Anytime you attack the author and not the content, it is pretty much an ad hominem. These get used heavily in the Chinese press as well, so I assume there isn’t the taboo against using ad hominems (and other red herrings) in Chinese culture as there is in western culture. Wumao is basically someone who is paid by the Chinese government to subvert online public opi…

Thanks for the reply. I have edited my comment so that it is less personal. Is that enough to remove the ad hominems? Also, there's plenty of room for nuance to judge the bias, like the other authors on FT that I pointed out in my comment. Her bias is quite clear in my own opinion, given that there are many articles by her on China in FT, and most of the content (at least first few pages) is critical of China (not ju…

Ad hominem is easy to fall into if you don't know what to look for, we all do it unless we are trained/train ourselves otherwise, it is just human nature. The reason it is taboo is that it is really an emotional appeal rather than a rational one.

As always in western press, bad news is much more visible than good news, leading to an appearance of bias against China when it is really just a bias for bad news that readers will take note of. The CPC is exploiting this exactly with sixthtone, realizing that their feel good only propaganda approach doesn't translate abroad.

Also, certain reporters do feel good articles, others are better at critical ones, it doesn't mean that the reporter has a bone to pick with China, just that they have a job to do. In reality, she is probably less salty than the average long term laowai.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#74

Post by TeMPOraL »

PhilipA wrote: post #35

I remember hearing from a colleague that Expensify wasn’t automatically identifying the expenses, but had helped with manual labor. I don’t know if it is true and quite honestly I as a consumer doesn’t care. If some is giving me a good experience which eases my work, I don’t really care if it was done with AI, human labor or magic - as long as it works.

You might care if you've chosen Expensify instead of another company in the same space out of expectation that human eyes will not look over your expense data. Of course Expensify's obvious defense will be that they don't explicitly give that guarantee...

But you might also want to care about this on general level. So many bullshit companies doing fake-AI create perception that the technology is much more advanced than it really is; this influences public opinion, and political decisions. Consider e.g. the coming wave of AI-induced job loss, that was such a hot topic just a year or two ago (for some reason it seems to have died down recently). After "Humans Need Not Apply", I expected we'll see significant effects in a decade. These days, I'm much more conservative about the timeframe, because I've learned that most of the immediate fear was based on hype and false advertising of a new statistical gimmick (deep NNs), that in reality only sorta, kinda, works, for some very limited tasks.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#76

Post by TeMPOraL »

justtopost wrote: post #71
sesqu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim is that there may be a market for AI-powered technologies, but that market is suppressed by non-AI competitors exploiting information asymmetry.

Wouldn't that suggest however that AI is not the best tool for the job? AI should be the great equalizer if the tech actually was useful, but I have seen precious few examples. The usual triumphs are almost all actually human sourced and then delivered by algo. (google image, etc.)

No, the point is that dishonest marketing distorts the market. The companies use human labour to deliver useful services, but falsely advertise as AI-driven to capitalize on the novelty factor. This makes life more difficult for both companies delivering the same service, but advertising honestly, and for companies actually trying to deliver the product by means of AI. The result is that money flows to dishonest people, instead of honest people and/or people actually trying to push technology forward.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#77

Post by obastani »

justtopost wrote: post #71
sesqu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim is that there may be a market for AI-powered technologies, but that market is suppressed by non-AI competitors exploiting information asymmetry.

Wouldn't that suggest however that AI is not the best tool for the job? AI should be the great equalizer if the tech actually was useful, but I have seen precious few examples. The usual triumphs are almost all actually human sourced and then delivered by algo. (google image, etc.)

This is an issue if the non-AI company using humans is not profitable (supported by VC funding) with the goal of "eventually replacing humans with AI". If they are not transparent to investors about this point, then investors may have preferred to invest in a company that already has AI that works well enough (but not as well as the humans in the first company). Perhaps the first company will never be able to build the AI, leading to a market failure.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#78

Post by OliverJones »

roymurdock wrote: post #65
tabbott wrote: post #8

A poorly-kept secret in Silicon Valley is that many "AI startups" started over the last few years are actually using humans, with a long-term plan to slowly decrease the amount of work the humans do using algorithms (generally based on machine learning, but not always) as well as more basic automation. In some cases they don't actually do any "AI" work for the company's first few years, and if they do, it's more like…

nobody knows how to do actual AI because the complexity of the human brain with all of its sensory inputs/memory is light years beyond what we can create with chips and ram. even machine learning, which is meant to be a step below AI (machine...learning things) has been passed over in the hype cycle because most of it is just basic linear regression that saves a few companies 5% in costs per year. not a brand new fie…

Right. When some application of AI (voice recognition and OCR for example) starts to work properly, it stops being called AI. Almost by definition the field of AI is the field of unsolved problems.

When simultaneous translation becomes a product, its makers will stop claiming they do AI, and start claiming "we used AI to create this."

This is only a problem when credulous and powerful investors (a dangerous combination) get caught up in the hype.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#79

Post by TekMol »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #37
TekMol wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first 10 DuckDuckGo images are all about the chess playing turk: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mechanical+turk&t=h_&iax=images&ia...

That's why I wrote text search.

And because of what the text search returns you cannot link to an illustration?
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