Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious, is what the article describes illegal? Or just false marketing.
In a proper democracy false advertising is or should be illegal.
Only in America you'd see someone disagree with this.
AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
41–50 of 121 posts
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#42A 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…
The Lean Startup approach specifically recommends doing something like this as a "concierge MVP" to gauge customer demand before actually building the automation technology. It's a general approach, not anything specific to AI. Of course the underlying assumption there is that the technology is actually feasible.
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#43Being in the public sector, I have the joy of sitting in a lot of meetings with companies and consultants that want to sell us AI for analytics and prediction. I’m still unconvinced. The closest I’ve seen to anything useful was Watson, and all it really offered was stuff we’ve been doing for years. I mean, we have 5 people working with data and building models, and Watson could maybe automate some of that, but you’d…
In my opinion, we cannot compare blockchain and AI : blockchains are a type of data structure based on hashes, while AI is a wide and fuzzy concept with different meanings over the years.
Process automations and "AI" (let's say, complex autonomous systems) are parts of a bigger picture which is the digitalization of the society. Sometime, they are sold as a drop-in replacement for current human processes, but it actually works in only a few common cases.
The issue with AI and automation is not necessarily a technical one, the issue is the shift to a different ownership model, trust model, maintenance model and faster improvement model than the ones being believed possible, or currently in place for the last decades.
It's not that software cannot replace people, rather that big corporations are resistant to changes. We don't need to introduce AI to see the internal inefficiencies of big employers...
Technologies fundamentally change the meaning and content of "work", but people cannot fundamentally change that fast. Budgets cannot change that fast, investments cannot change that fast, regulations cannot change that fast, etc. There will be a lot of preliminary work to do in changing the educational system, regulations and also changing the redistribution of wealthiness, before "AI" actually happens.
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#44A 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…
>(A) it's really hard to work on machine learning without a lot of data, and it's often hard to get that data without actual users using the product in roughly the way it's supposed to work, and Delusional; if it's really hard to get it to work then it's really hard to get it to work; investors should not believe "if only we get the data" >(B) the company can prove there's commercially significant demand for the user…
>> Delusional; if it's really hard to get it to work then it's really hard to get it to work; investors should not believe "if only we get the data"
Not having sufficient data to train a machine learning algorithm is a legitimate concern. Statistical machine learning algorithms are very bad at generalising, so they need lots and lots of examples of every possible variation of a concept, in order to model the concept well.
That is why everyone's going gaga over "the new electricity" (by Andrew Ng's saying). So in some cases, yes, there are applications that are impossible to develop without "the data".
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#45This isn't the first time something like this has happened. Pinscreen was also accused of faking results, including those shown off at Siggraph 2017. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/18/pinscreen_fraud_cla...
> This isn't the first time something like this has happened.
This has been happening for centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#46A 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…
The actual approach is a perfectly reasonable business strategy
Except for keeping this secret. Than it's called lying.
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#47[deleted]
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#48A 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…
The Lean Startup approach specifically recommends doing something like this as a "concierge MVP" to gauge customer demand before actually building the automation technology. It's a general approach, not anything specific to AI. Of course the underlying assumption there is that the technology is actually feasible.
This is the main problem imo and the reason why people with real domain knowledge hate these companies. Most of the people funding, selling, or buying “AI” products have no clue what is feasible!
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#49A 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…
Do you have any specific examples of AI products that are allegedly secretly using humans (don’t bother dropping specific company names)? It strikes me as something that would only be viable in very narrow cases.
Anything customer-facing and low-latency, like human language translation, image classification, or speech recognition doesn’t seem viable at even modest scale. Anything involving large amounts of data, like analyzing financial data or server logs, seems potentially doable though still unlikely.
In general, it seems like the main advantage of AI products today is either latency of output or size of input, both of which seem difficult to fake by using humans. If a customer has a small amount of input data and wants a small number of results that are indistinguishable from what a trained human would produce, surely they would have no misconceptions about the current state of AI, and would just hire the human to produce it.
Of course a company marketing an online service that sells AI-generated musical compositions could cheat by hiring experienced human composers. But if there’s any money in such a service at all, I expect the customers would want to be able to generate a huge number of compositions, something that humans would probably not be able to do at any appreciable scale. If the customer wanted a single composition that sounded like it was composed by an expert human, I’m pretty sure they would just hire the human.
One thing I certainly could believe is common is human sanity checks on AI output, but that doesn’t strike me as bad or dishonest unless the seller is specifically claiming (for some reason) that no humans are involved. I could also definitely believe that companies fake AI demos for potential investors or future customers.
What types of AI products would be best-suited for humans to be able to viably fake?
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#50A 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…
The actual approach is a perfectly reasonable business strategy Except for keeping this secret. Than it's called lying.
Looking around the world, lying seems to have been redefined as; "a perfectly reasonable business strategy".
One of the biggest shocks I had going from childhood to adulthood was the sudden flip between people telling you that you have to be honest and the people now telling you to stop being honest. And the people who had previously told you that you must be honest, they tell you "oh yes, that's work", when you go back to ask them what you should do given you are being instructed by the people who pay your wages that you now have to lie.