The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work
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Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work
#2My favorite example of this sort of thing, mentioned in the Guardian story, is the kerfuffle late last year when Expensify's receipt-reading SmartScan feature was found out to be partly backed by human receipt readers:
https://qz.com/1141695/startup-expensifys-smart-scanning-tec...
(I don't file expenses often, but personally when I do so through Expensify, I find SmartScan so slow that I now assume all my "SmartScanned" receipts are going to a human.)
Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work
#3Not 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!)
Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work
#4Not sure guardian understands how training AI works.
Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work
#5One issue with Artificial Intelligence is that it is typically referred to and understood in a way that concludes it is similarly functional in its domain as actual (i.e. human) intelligence would be. In reality AI is more akin to artificial cheese. Artificial cheese is not cheese just made with different ingredients. It is something vaguely cheese like made in a way completely dissimilar to real cheese.
Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work
#6Fake it 'til you make it!
Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work
#7Absolutely 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
Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work
#8Just the latest incarnation of the good old Mechanical Turk:
Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work
#9AI 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.
Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work
#10Just the latest incarnation of the good old Mechanical Turk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
One of the services that you can use to implement pseudo-AI is also called that.