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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

#112

Off topic, but SixthTone is an interesting publication. It is actually controlled by the CPC in an attempt to create news that westerners would actually read [1], as opposed to Chinadaily and Globaltimes that are too obviously propaganda. In this case, they go with China-critical articles and then try to direct the message to a pro-government position from that perspective. This is actually how wumaos are supposed to…

> China, Explained > BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN Wow. That's an incredible title to use on a subject that is so narrow in scope. Let's look at her other articles: https://foreignpolicy.com/author/bethany-allen-ebrahimian/ Seems pretty one-sided. And her twitter: https://twitter.com/BethanyAllenEbr Seems pretty one-sided as well. Just to be clear, I don't intend to personally attack her. Just pointing out the bias in…

"Probably it is a good time for us to reflect on this, and maybe next we can try to appreciate and acknowledge others’ arguments before jumping into a rebuttal."

[cit. https://paradite.com/2014/01/23/good-articletaking-a-war-of-...]

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

#113
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China, Explained > BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN Wow. That's an incredible title to use on a subject that is so narrow in scope. Let's look at her other articles: https://foreignpolicy.com/author/bethany-allen-ebrahimian/ Seems pretty one-sided. And her twitter: https://twitter.com/BethanyAllenEbr Seems pretty one-sided as well. Just to be clear, I don't intend to personally attack her. Just pointing out the bias in…

"Probably it is a good time for us to reflect on this, and maybe next we can try to appreciate and acknowledge others’ arguments before jumping into a rebuttal." [cit. https://paradite.com/2014/01/23/good-articletaking-a-war-of-... ]

Yes. I'm guilty of this quite often. And probably in this case too. That's why I need constant reminders like your comment.

Do you know the article beforehand or you discovered it through my profile?

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

#114
post #92
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very frustrating for companies who actually do use machine learning to solve a problem! Hard to rise above the background "AI noise" of well-funded marketing. And people are already fed up with all the AI marketing bullshit; "ebbing tide sinks all boats". One way is to offer real-time results via APIs or demos, which cannot be faked with humans due to sheer latency / volume. Another is to be active in the ML communit…

>Very frustrating for companies who actually do use machine learning to solve a problem! I get that on a purely technical level, but really... who cares about the implementation? If a company is solving problems it really doesn't matter, and if they're solving it better using some mix of ML and human intervention... again; who cares?

Anyone who's betting on the growth of the company. Hiring more and more humans doesn't scale as well as automating tasks.

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

#115
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Probably it is a good time for us to reflect on this, and maybe next we can try to appreciate and acknowledge others’ arguments before jumping into a rebuttal." [cit. https://paradite.com/2014/01/23/good-articletaking-a-war-of-... ]

Yes. I'm guilty of this quite often. And probably in this case too. That's why I need constant reminders like your comment. Do you know the article beforehand or you discovered it through my profile?

I checked your profile and blog after reading this discussion. Now I feel some regret posting that anyway, as I think my comment did not add anything valuable to this discussion and was only instrumental to reprove you, a person who I don't know. So I would like to apologize, I am sorry for my stupidity and lightness.

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

#116
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My point was that a regular user won't find the historical meaning of the term "mechanical turk" without hacks, being steered towards commercial products of that name instead.

Ok. But in your text you seemed to say you cannot find the illustrations:

    Reminds me of classic mechanical chess-playing
    turk illustrations. I was about to link it here,
    but all the search engines could come up using
    plain text search were links to Amazon's
    crowdsourcing thing

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

#117
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…

cough cough Palantir.

Palantir had never claimed to do AI — just the opposite, that human+computer is more powerful than either separately in many domains.

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

#118
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.)

But they should be honest about their claims. Perhaps the customer is expecting that humans don't process their personal information on a routine basis.

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

#120
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 don't care? So if someone in offshore labor camp starts collecting your uber receipts so they gather where you live and your regular movements, then gathers your medical bills (say you did trust that mob) they have nearly enough to do a nice social engineering job on you. You should care. Turkey companies doing this should be exposed so consumers who actually care about their privacy know about them and when their employer forces them to use these apps they can say no and stand up for data-privacy. Just my 2c worth ;-)

ps. Expensify sent images with personal data to Mechanical Turkers, calls it a feature

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/expen...

There are others out there too and you can check out their "Privacy Policies" whether they use "data extraction teams" offshore.

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