14 ms·

The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

136 points by floatalong 10y ago

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
I suppose on its face it's not a bad idea: pay some people to train an AI agent. It's a bit annoying that any information about how it's working out so far is unavailable, but on the other hand, it's also rather revealing that it is. If it was working that well we'd probably have heard a lot about their tech by now.
Aelinsaar 10y ago
Is there any indication that there is actually light at the end of this tunnel, and not just a lot more tunnel? How much of this is just smoke and mirrors for the sake of product development, and how much is just to bilk investors? I read the entire article, and I don't get the sense that the author is totally sure either.
- Animats 10y ago
  The company with the $9/month price point has to reach near full automation or die. The company with the $200/month price point could be totally manual until the automated systems catch up. Recommended viewing: "The Devil wears Prada", Andy's first day at Runway.
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    Hell, I've been meaning to see that movie anyway, thanks.
aresant 10y ago
I am actually shocked to learn that x.ai has human beings reading the emails. X.AI's marketing materials state it's "An AI personal assistant who schedules meetings for you." Their default tagline in every email sent says "x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings " You have to dig into their press kit to get any mention of human "Supervised Learning". My typical interaction with Amy has been a 3rd party suddenly CC'ing her (it) into an existing thread. In many of those cases those threads contain information that I would consider to be confidential. In some cases the people on the other end work for public companies that I am POSITIVE would not allow for a non-approved human to have access to that information. I understand the counter argument that x.ai's warehousing this info regardless, but introducing a human under the guise of a blind-AI is unsettling. It's a disingenuous pitch and should have repercussions if they don't improve their disclosures of what the service is actually doing.
- mathattack 10y ago
  Isn't this typical of the "Fake it until you have product/market fit, then automate" ethos?
  - aresant 10y ago
    Pitch: "x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings" Reality: "A group of low-paid humans (that may-or-may not have been background checked) will read your emails to help you schedule meetings. They will probably not use this information in any way other than intended." Those feel like two different products that I would make fundamentally different decisions about.
    - cloudjacker 10y ago
      > that may-or-may not have been background checked thats funny, I'll pass the background check and still trade on the inside information, I'm short your house right now
    - cubano 10y ago
      Maybe, in the VCs minds, a "group of low-paid humans" is equivalent to "ai."
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      Shouldn't be much different. In either case you have no idea what the external person/AI will do with your data.
  - caseysoftware 10y ago
    Yes and I think that works with many areas and in many products. But when you have confidential information in the mix - especially stuff that might have SEC implications - it changes the game. A few years ago, I did a contract with a company that had a system that deleted all email greater than a year old. While the official answer was that it was "to save space and improve network performance" I suspect the unstated reason was to prevent fishing expeditions. If your email is being cc'd outside the org and read by actual humans, that introduces some awkward problems.. and may force people to admit the actual reason for the policy. ;)
abpavel 10y ago
SV has learned a lot from Hollywood: It's not what behind the scenes that counts.
stephanheijl 10y ago
Sounds like some of these companies aren't even implementing the automation part. > But she and another former employee, Alex Gioiella, said the only automated part of the service they saw was the occasional marketing text message. You'd think that the human workers would at least get served up suggestions by the system if it were actually learning, to make sure the algorithm got "gold-standard" feedback on its dataset. Especially requests like those for delivery food could be standardized pretty quickly, so that workers would only be handed situations where the "AI" (if there even was any machine learning involved) was uncertain as to what needed to be done. > But usually, the Hero said, the requests were for pizza or Chipotle delivery.
cb18 10y ago
I get that they are trying to use the human responses as a training set. But the scope of these general purpose concierge services mean that what they are going after is damn near Artificial General Intelligence. At least in terms of capability, after-all ordering a burrito and locating an antique skull is a pretty broad capability range. And at what point of accuracy are they aiming for for the systems to run on their own? I guess they're thinking they can get pretty good at identifying the easy requests the system can fulfill at 99.9999% accuracy and then shift the harder requests to a human. At that point it seems like they're just building a system that can distinguish hard requests from easy requests. Sure fulfilling the easy requests with AI is a feat in itself, but how many of those easy requests does it make sense to go through a third party? Why doesn't the burrito shop just set up it's own ordering bot? Am I missing something? The edge cases seem so broad that to sufficiently fulfill them would require something like AGI and the more approachable tasks of ordering pizza or burritos seem unnecessary of a third party.
- cb18 10y ago
  I guess one answer to my question might be: They are trying to build an AGI. But one would have to say that the relatively sparse training data consisting mostly of takeout orders, and the sweatshop like environment would be a strange way to go about attempting such a thing.
- resu_nimda 10y ago
  I've said it before[1] and I'll say it again...the surge of interest in chatbots is premature. We're not even close to solving this problem, because yeah, it has to "learn" and "understand" language, which is equivalent to full intelligence according to some theories. My guess is, for the foreseeable future, these services will fall into one of two categories: 1. Backed by legions of humans, and thus not that interesting. 2. Trivial at best (ordering pizza with marginally less effort than before, a glorified collection of Slack plugins), disastrous at worst (Microsoft's Tay, the subject of my other post). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11366351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11366351
seibelj 10y ago
The solution is so blindingly obvious: You are creating AI not to replace humans, but to assist humans. If your humans can manage 50 emails per hour, you judge the quality of improvements to the AI on how any more emails per hour they can handle. This is from improving the tools humans use to completely eliminating the human from the equation in certain cases. Then your customers need to rate the quality of the service to see if automatically handled emails had the side-effect of reducing quality, which then needs to be weighed against the cost savings.
- exolymph 10y ago
  Agreed. I even think that we'll get closer and closer to general AI the more we use the technology that's ready now to help humans.
anaskar 10y ago
The goal/intent/promise with these companies is always train AI to automate the process. This is good for both "buzz" and cost reasons long-term. Companies describe the AI as two-fold: 1) actual AI responding to your requests and 2) Automation making human workers' jobs much easier, ie. a really good CRM or scheduling algo. The reality is that high growth almost always means throwing more people at the problem under the guise of being "trainers" when in reality the technology only really caters to #2 (better automation) and the company is forced to pivot before ever really getting to #1 (AI handling the requests) either due to distractions or inability to actual deliver on the promise.
388 10y ago
hi
taneq 10y ago
"But for now, the companies are largely powered by people, clicking behind the curtain and making it look like magic." Does this remind anyone else of the anonymous voice actors behind the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer?
- zipwitch 10y ago
  Yes. Here come the ractors. Just one of a great many points of correspondence between the present day and cyberpunk dystopian fiction. (Technically, I think Diamond Age is post-cyberpunk.) Over at Naked Capitalism, the daily news rundown has a section titled The Jackpot.
  - duckingtest 10y ago
    What was dystopian about Diamond Age? While it wasn't explicitly utopian, the world is much closer to utopia than dystopia. Certainly better than current reality.
jessaustin 10y ago
No one here will be shocked at the eventual investor lawsuits, but I was a bit surprised at the "Pain -- Solution" graphic. Unless "Michael" is very senior to "John", he is a complete asshole: J: I'll be free to meet at these times... M: Yeah whatever. I can't be arsed to look at my calendar, so talk to my secretary. Oh wait... I'm too cheap to hire a secretary so why don't you talk to this robot instead? I get it, Lords of the Universe can make you work out the details with their administrative assistant. But then they actually have to employ that person. Is this product pitch aimed at "temporarily embarrassed executives" who envy that sad dominance game?
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  You've correctly identified the problem x.ai really solves: I want a secretary but I'm not that important. The ridiculous thing is that doodle.com already solved this problem in a much less sexy way - just click the time you want. Problem solved in 10 seconds (vs minutes with this dumb bot).
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    Wow, your comment plus TFA's description of the working conditions for the "Heroes" (perhaps the most Orwellian nomenclature I've seen this month): I'm suddenly reminded of an SF short story I must have read decades ago (the title and author of which escape me) in which tourists visiting Vietnam have "fun" in a demented "Vietnam War" theme park, where they get to gun down screaming robot peasants. Inevitably, a gruesome discovery is made... it suffices to say, Benjanun Sriduangkaew would not approve. In the future, will "I thought it was a computer program behind the interface" be something like "I was just following orders"?
  - exolymph 10y ago
    This is my beef with chatbots in general -- it is the rare conversational interface that has any advantage over a GUI beyond its novelty.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
exolymph 10y ago
Funny comment from a Facebook friend: "The meta-turing test: A human trying to convince another human that it is chatting with a computer program. Thankfully a human dumbing itself to chatbot level is far more doable than the opposite." https://www.facebook.com/groups/cyberpunkculture/permalink/531331800380538/?comment_id=531332370380481&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R%22%7D https://www.facebook.com/groups/cyberpunkculture/permalink/5...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
throwawayxai 10y ago
One of the reasons I left x.ai was that I believed the leadership was deliberately misleading users, investors, and employees with false advertising and extremely inflated and skewed metrics. I am sure that the company is making great progress, because it is full of very intelligent people tackling an interesting problem. But the way they treated employees, customers and investors was unacceptable to me.

136 points by floatalong 10y ago

I suppose on its face it's not a bad idea: pay some people to train an AI agent. It's a bit annoying that any information about how it's working out so far is unavailable, but on the other hand, it's also rather revealing that it is. If it was working that well we'd probably have heard a lot about their tech by now.

Aelinsaar 10y ago

Is there any indication that there is actually light at the end of this tunnel, and not just a lot more tunnel? How much of this is just smoke and mirrors for the sake of product development, and how much is just to bilk investors? I read the entire article, and I don't get the sense that the author is totally sure either.

Animats 10y ago
The company with the $9/month price point has to reach near full automation or die. The company with the $200/month price point could be totally manual until the automated systems catch up. Recommended viewing: "The Devil wears Prada", Andy's first day at Runway.
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  Hell, I've been meaning to see that movie anyway, thanks.

aresant 10y ago

I am actually shocked to learn that x.ai has human beings reading the emails. X.AI's marketing materials state it's "An AI personal assistant who schedules meetings for you." Their default tagline in every email sent says "x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings " You have to dig into their press kit to get any mention of human "Supervised Learning". My typical interaction with Amy has been a 3rd party suddenly CC'ing her (it) into an existing thread. In many of those cases those threads contain information that I would consider to be confidential. In some cases the people on the other end work for public companies that I am POSITIVE would not allow for a non-approved human to have access to that information. I understand the counter argument that x.ai's warehousing this info regardless, but introducing a human under the guise of a blind-AI is unsettling. It's a disingenuous pitch and should have repercussions if they don't improve their disclosures of what the service is actually doing.

mathattack 10y ago
Isn't this typical of the "Fake it until you have product/market fit, then automate" ethos?
- aresant 10y ago
  Pitch: "x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings" Reality: "A group of low-paid humans (that may-or-may not have been background checked) will read your emails to help you schedule meetings. They will probably not use this information in any way other than intended." Those feel like two different products that I would make fundamentally different decisions about.
  - cloudjacker 10y ago
    > that may-or-may not have been background checked thats funny, I'll pass the background check and still trade on the inside information, I'm short your house right now
  - cubano 10y ago
    Maybe, in the VCs minds, a "group of low-paid humans" is equivalent to "ai."
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    Shouldn't be much different. In either case you have no idea what the external person/AI will do with your data.
- caseysoftware 10y ago
  Yes and I think that works with many areas and in many products. But when you have confidential information in the mix - especially stuff that might have SEC implications - it changes the game. A few years ago, I did a contract with a company that had a system that deleted all email greater than a year old. While the official answer was that it was "to save space and improve network performance" I suspect the unstated reason was to prevent fishing expeditions. If your email is being cc'd outside the org and read by actual humans, that introduces some awkward problems.. and may force people to admit the actual reason for the policy. ;)

abpavel 10y ago

SV has learned a lot from Hollywood: It's not what behind the scenes that counts.

stephanheijl 10y ago

Sounds like some of these companies aren't even implementing the automation part. > But she and another former employee, Alex Gioiella, said the only automated part of the service they saw was the occasional marketing text message. You'd think that the human workers would at least get served up suggestions by the system if it were actually learning, to make sure the algorithm got "gold-standard" feedback on its dataset. Especially requests like those for delivery food could be standardized pretty quickly, so that workers would only be handed situations where the "AI" (if there even was any machine learning involved) was uncertain as to what needed to be done. > But usually, the Hero said, the requests were for pizza or Chipotle delivery.

cb18 10y ago

I get that they are trying to use the human responses as a training set. But the scope of these general purpose concierge services mean that what they are going after is damn near Artificial General Intelligence. At least in terms of capability, after-all ordering a burrito and locating an antique skull is a pretty broad capability range. And at what point of accuracy are they aiming for for the systems to run on their own? I guess they're thinking they can get pretty good at identifying the easy requests the system can fulfill at 99.9999% accuracy and then shift the harder requests to a human. At that point it seems like they're just building a system that can distinguish hard requests from easy requests. Sure fulfilling the easy requests with AI is a feat in itself, but how many of those easy requests does it make sense to go through a third party? Why doesn't the burrito shop just set up it's own ordering bot? Am I missing something? The edge cases seem so broad that to sufficiently fulfill them would require something like AGI and the more approachable tasks of ordering pizza or burritos seem unnecessary of a third party.

cb18 10y ago
I guess one answer to my question might be: They are trying to build an AGI. But one would have to say that the relatively sparse training data consisting mostly of takeout orders, and the sweatshop like environment would be a strange way to go about attempting such a thing.
resu_nimda 10y ago
I've said it before[1] and I'll say it again...the surge of interest in chatbots is premature. We're not even close to solving this problem, because yeah, it has to "learn" and "understand" language, which is equivalent to full intelligence according to some theories. My guess is, for the foreseeable future, these services will fall into one of two categories: 1. Backed by legions of humans, and thus not that interesting. 2. Trivial at best (ordering pizza with marginally less effort than before, a glorified collection of Slack plugins), disastrous at worst (Microsoft's Tay, the subject of my other post). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11366351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11366351

seibelj 10y ago

The solution is so blindingly obvious: You are creating AI not to replace humans, but to assist humans. If your humans can manage 50 emails per hour, you judge the quality of improvements to the AI on how any more emails per hour they can handle. This is from improving the tools humans use to completely eliminating the human from the equation in certain cases. Then your customers need to rate the quality of the service to see if automatically handled emails had the side-effect of reducing quality, which then needs to be weighed against the cost savings.

exolymph 10y ago
Agreed. I even think that we'll get closer and closer to general AI the more we use the technology that's ready now to help humans.

anaskar 10y ago

The goal/intent/promise with these companies is always train AI to automate the process. This is good for both "buzz" and cost reasons long-term. Companies describe the AI as two-fold: 1) actual AI responding to your requests and 2) Automation making human workers' jobs much easier, ie. a really good CRM or scheduling algo. The reality is that high growth almost always means throwing more people at the problem under the guise of being "trainers" when in reality the technology only really caters to #2 (better automation) and the company is forced to pivot before ever really getting to #1 (AI handling the requests) either due to distractions or inability to actual deliver on the promise.

388 10y ago

taneq 10y ago

"But for now, the companies are largely powered by people, clicking behind the curtain and making it look like magic." Does this remind anyone else of the anonymous voice actors behind the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer?

zipwitch 10y ago
Yes. Here come the ractors. Just one of a great many points of correspondence between the present day and cyberpunk dystopian fiction. (Technically, I think Diamond Age is post-cyberpunk.) Over at Naked Capitalism, the daily news rundown has a section titled The Jackpot.
- duckingtest 10y ago
  What was dystopian about Diamond Age? While it wasn't explicitly utopian, the world is much closer to utopia than dystopia. Certainly better than current reality.

jessaustin 10y ago

No one here will be shocked at the eventual investor lawsuits, but I was a bit surprised at the "Pain -- Solution" graphic. Unless "Michael" is very senior to "John", he is a complete asshole: J: I'll be free to meet at these times... M: Yeah whatever. I can't be arsed to look at my calendar, so talk to my secretary. Oh wait... I'm too cheap to hire a secretary so why don't you talk to this robot instead? I get it, Lords of the Universe can make you work out the details with their administrative assistant. But then they actually have to employ that person. Is this product pitch aimed at "temporarily embarrassed executives" who envy that sad dominance game?

yummyfajitas 10y ago
You've correctly identified the problem x.ai really solves: I want a secretary but I'm not that important. The ridiculous thing is that doodle.com already solved this problem in a much less sexy way - just click the time you want. Problem solved in 10 seconds (vs minutes with this dumb bot).
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Wow, your comment plus TFA's description of the working conditions for the "Heroes" (perhaps the most Orwellian nomenclature I've seen this month): I'm suddenly reminded of an SF short story I must have read decades ago (the title and author of which escape me) in which tourists visiting Vietnam have "fun" in a demented "Vietnam War" theme park, where they get to gun down screaming robot peasants. Inevitably, a gruesome discovery is made... it suffices to say, Benjanun Sriduangkaew would not approve. In the future, will "I thought it was a computer program behind the interface" be something like "I was just following orders"?
- exolymph 10y ago
  This is my beef with chatbots in general -- it is the rare conversational interface that has any advantage over a GUI beyond its novelty.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago

exolymph 10y ago

Funny comment from a Facebook friend: "The meta-turing test: A human trying to convince another human that it is chatting with a computer program. Thankfully a human dumbing itself to chatbot level is far more doable than the opposite." https://www.facebook.com/groups/cyberpunkculture/permalink/531331800380538/?comment_id=531332370380481&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R%22%7D https://www.facebook.com/groups/cyberpunkculture/permalink/5...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

throwawayxai 10y ago

One of the reasons I left x.ai was that I believed the leadership was deliberately misleading users, investors, and employees with false advertising and extremely inflated and skewed metrics. I am sure that the company is making great progress, because it is full of very intelligent people tackling an interesting problem. But the way they treated employees, customers and investors was unacceptable to me.