21 ms·

AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

246 points by ytch 8y ago

RandomGuyDTB 8y ago
I think I can speak for the typical person when I say this: what
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  The whole idea is that AI is supposed to: a) run more accurately than humans - good luck when translating b) run with lower cost - even Mechanical Turk is not as cheap c) do not require an army of people to handle the task If the "AI" company lies by using manual translation without the Turk, they're lying about point B a lot. If they're using Turk, they're lying about point C and a bit less about point B.
gattis 8y ago
artificial artificial intelligence
- i_made_a_booboo 8y ago
  Nailed it.
- cosmie 8y ago
  Funny enough, a lot of marketing spiels break out AI as "augmented intelligence". And take the position that it's not their fault if people misinterpret their use of AI as artificial intelligence.
yters 8y ago
Makes sense. Law of information non-growth proves AI cannot create mutual information. Only source we know of is people. This fake AI is the future of the industry.
- phreeza 8y ago
  I guess you are talking about the second law of thermodynamics? Even humans don't violate that, the have to get the energy for generating information from somewhere, and that increases entropy.
  - yters 8y ago
    No, Leonid Levin's law of information non growth in algorithmic information theory. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17986929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17986929
icelancer 8y ago
The actual Mechanical Turk.
etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
I have priced some popular computer vision APIs and found you can get a human in southeast Asia to do the work cheaper... Something seems wrong with that!!!
- captain_perl 8y ago
  OpenCV is free and used for important projects at companies including Yahoo! and others.
  - zo1 8y ago
    OpenCV won't do the recognition/task for you, which is what the OP was referring to. In a nutshell, it's a bunch of useful tools/building-blocks. It's up to you to use them in the right way, and then apply CV algorithms + training so that it can do something.
tabbott 8y ago
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 likely a quick-and-dirty logistic regression than what most people think of as "interesting AI". The actual approach is a perfectly reasonable business strategy, because (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 (B) the company can prove there's commercially significant demand for the user experience that they hope to be able to eventually do with some algorithms/AI technology, and thus can attract investor capital for making the thing actually work (potentially years later). In some cases, the human-powered product might actually be really good, and the economics might work in. But it really sucks that the general hype around AI has generated a whole category of "AI companies" that don't actually use any AI technology. The dishonesty is really poor (I have a friend who's actually a machine learning expert start a job at one of these companies, and only then discover that the company did not use machine learning and no technical plans to do in the next year and actually just wanted another web developer... which obviously resulted in my friend quitting). That said, I expect the trend to continue as long as companies get lots of extra press and investor attention for claiming to be an AI company.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  cough cough Palantir.
  - thelastbender12 8y ago
    Curious, is what the article describes illegal? Or just false marketing.
    - kgc 8y ago
      False advertisement is also illegal.
Mr_P 8y ago
This 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_claims/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/18/pinscreen_fraud_cla...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- JimDabell 8y ago
  > This isn't the first time something like this has happened. This has been happening for centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
DonHopkins 8y ago
I always suspected that Emacs's Doctor AI knew a bit too much about RMS's hangups and inhibitions. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html
AlexandrB 8y ago
As Uber proved: AI is hard, but labor arbitrage is easy.
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
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 work in China as well. If they go with a blatantly pro-government message, they will be ignored by anyone critical of the Chinese government. So instead, they come in agreeing with critical positions and redirect sentiment from there. So if you ever hear someone who sounds like a wumao, they are probably just overzealous nationalists and not shills. [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-tone-is-chinas-latest-party-approved-outlet-humanizing-news/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-t...
- paradite 8y ago
  > 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/ https://foreignpolicy.com/author/bethany-allen-ebrahimian/ Seems pretty one-sided. And her twitter: https://twitter.com/BethanyAllenEbr 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 her reporting while we are on this topic of "wumao". I am also not targeting Foreign Policy as a news media, as Foreign Policy itself doesn't seem to suffer from bias against China as a whole, as there are other authors that are either more neutral or biased towards China: https://foreignpolicy.com/tag/tea-leaf-nation/ https://foreignpolicy.com/tag/tea-leaf-nation/ https://foreignpolicy.com/author/melissa-chan/ https://foreignpolicy.com/author/melissa-chan/ https://foreignpolicy.com/author/ran-jijun/ https://foreignpolicy.com/author/ran-jijun/ Edit: Attempt to remove personal attacks in the comment. Edit 2: Remove the section about myself.
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    start out with an overtly critical almost "ad hominem attack" position, include your own stance in the course of your argument and redirect sentiment-in this case trying to garner sympathy for yourself for being attacked as a wumao. you're either actually a wumao or are too afraid to actually take a reasoned stance. i had never heard of the term before this thread but makes sense, i'm reading a lot more content like this nowadays wondering what exactly the author is arguing about
agibsonccc 8y ago
I was a speaker at a conference they were doing live annotation for. (http://waic2018.com/index-en.html http://waic2018.com/index-en.html) See slide deck here for proof: https://www.slideshare.net/agibsonccc/world-artificial-intelligence-conference-shanghai-2018 https://www.slideshare.net/agibsonccc/world-artificial-intel... Beyond that, commenting on the translation a bit. They did live translation the first day of WAIC for the headline speakers. There were 2 screens, 1 was baidu and the other was iflytek. Neither were that good on the english side (it was ok..but could barely keep up with the speakers) They claim they are still working on english. The grammar output wasn't coherent. IFlytek itself has some neat hardware they sell that is pretty good. Beyond that, it seems like they are mainly collecting data right now. I would not be surprised they were doing this just for marketing visibility. It is easy to fake. Happy to answer questions about the experience there if people would find it useful.
eksemplar 8y ago
Being 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 still need people to qualify what it came up with and build the things it didn’t. We’ve run proof of concepts on stuff like traffic, and a small startup with a relationship with a university, build a route prediction thing that would make it easier to avoid jams. It worked, but it frankly didn’t work better than what our traffic department was already doing, using simple common sense. So we diverted the project to work on traffic light control for maximum flow, and it turned out that the settings our engineers had come up with were already optimal. Only our engineers had come up with the same results, using less resources. I’m beginning to think of AI as mostly hype. It does have some uses, like for recognition. We use ML and image recognition to troll through millions of old case files for various purposes. We use speech recognition to help people with dyslexia. But for analytics and prediction it’s been extremely useless compared to actual people. I’d love to be convinced otherwise by the way. If it actually does something, I’d like to be on the forefront with it so I don’t have to play catch up when Deloitte sells it to the mayor. But I have to admit that after 5 years of AI bullshit bingo I’m one sales meeting away from labeling AI in the same category as blockchain.
- sgt101 8y ago
  I think it depends on what you call AI and where you want to use it. Many people focus on "automation" - so do the analytics that an analyst would otherwise do. But as you note, mostly automation, workflow, analytic or chat, is only able to do very routine tasks, and it's still quite expensive to deploy. Another issue is that often when you tackle these domains it turns out that a commonsense non-technical approach is almost as good. On several occasions I've seen it's just a case of "stop doing that". On the other hand AI can be a powerful tool or assistant when humans are struggling with a task. AI that (for example) highlights all the suspicious places in an oncology image after an oncologist has had a look and labelled it as showing cancer could improve quality of outcome. I am deeply suspicious of people who want to chop the oncologist out though! More prosaically prediction systems to estimate future customer churn, identify sales opportunities (or in the public service case demand for services and needs), future traffic flows, complex settings for complex devices (especially in the face of change), diagnostics of problems, reasoning over millions of records, are all valuable. Often the theme is "can we make a very narrow very specialist component that could come to the same conclusions that a reasonably smart three year old would if we could make her concentrate and do it millions of times". So a bit smart, very autistic, very fast. What you will not do is create value from consultancy and procurement; you need to build a capability to get the value, and that is a slow, expensive and strategic game - think 4 high cost (but don't be bullshitted there are great people who will work for reasonable amounts out there so long as you don't expect them to be slaves and make bombs or crash the financial system - think doctor or lawyer cost and recruit with the support of your uni) fte for three years. If that is too expensive then I think it's going to be a waste of your time for now, and your current stance of sceptical openness is the right thing to do - eventually someone will come with a convincing shrink wrapped offer that is right for your domains, at the right price - then all is good.
tannhaeuser 8y ago
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 and its competitors. We've really put the car before the horse in so many ways on the 'net, to stay with a metaphor from orientalism.
- TekMol 8y ago
  The first 10 DuckDuckGo images are all about the chess playing turk: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mechanical+turk&t=h_&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mechanical+turk&t=h_&iax=images&ia...
  - tannhaeuser 8y ago
    That's why I wrote text search.
    - TekMol 8y ago
      And because of what the text search returns you cannot link to an illustration?
      - tannhaeuser 8y ago
        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.
        TekMol 8y ago
        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
PhilipA 8y ago
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.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  You might care as an investor, lest great consumer experience come from burning through VC. As an anology, if Uber claimed to have self driving taxis, but actually had people hiding in boxes driving them, that would be investment fraud. The promise of AI has always been not better experiences, but similar human touched experiences for a much cheaper cost.
  - PhilipA 8y ago
    My comment was merely mad as a consumer.
  - semerda 8y ago
    I'm on the fence about that... Take a look at Receipt Bank privacy policy https://www.receipt-bank.com/privacy-policy/ https://www.receipt-bank.com/privacy-policy/ -- search "data extraction team" and their mega $50M funding from US investors in 2017. I have found around 90% of accounting products do this and no one snuffles or maybe all that money is going into hiding this fact and buying off "influencers".. ok I will shut up now ;-)
- talltimtom 8y ago
  You don’t Care but some consumers will care that it’s real people going through all their data and not just a machine. And claiming to have AI but using manual labor is straight up investor fraud on a Theranos level.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  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.
rdlecler1 8y ago
You expect AI to get better over time and it doesn’t make arbitrary errors. I’ve been using x.ai for awhile and it has actually gotten worse. They always say that it’s algorithms (let’s lie to our customers twice!). Algorithms don’t mistake Tuesday for Wednesday.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cuboidGoat 8y ago
They appear to have stolen the plot of the film "Shooting Fish". Trailer - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120122/videoplayer/vi2760311065 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120122/videoplayer/vi276031106...
- swingline-747 8y ago
  Damnit or good... someone else remembers this. Oh well. Maybe they should've tried trading a red paperclip for a house?
mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
would services that learn from recaptcha be considered as utilizing machine learning or no? I mean, it is humans who power that technically...
inputcoffee 8y ago
Reverse Turing: people with such narrowly defined work that an unbiased observer cannot distinguish them from an AI
ricokatayama 8y ago
We are expecting too much to have AI solving all of our problems, when we should have develop tech to help us to achieve more with less. This is a huge mistake that many companies are falling on, they are trying to sell us a Jarvis when actually what they have is some (good) algorithms
m_herrlich 8y ago
It's all done by Algorithms! This guy's name is Algorithm, and this guy, and these other guys...
- rabidrat 8y ago
  This guy's name is al-Khwarizmi..
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kozikow 8y ago
I didn't use manual labeling during pilots for ML-based service and I regret it after the fact. Your customer cares about a business value. From my experience using buzzwords like "AI" will only get your foot in the door, but in the end, the business value will sell. IMO it's a completely valid business strategy if you are selling something at cost with the plan of reducing the cost later and you can stay solvent in the meantime.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

246 points by ytch 8y ago

RandomGuyDTB 8y ago

I think I can speak for the typical person when I say this: what

AstralStorm 8y ago
The whole idea is that AI is supposed to: a) run more accurately than humans - good luck when translating b) run with lower cost - even Mechanical Turk is not as cheap c) do not require an army of people to handle the task If the "AI" company lies by using manual translation without the Turk, they're lying about point B a lot. If they're using Turk, they're lying about point C and a bit less about point B.

gattis 8y ago

artificial artificial intelligence

i_made_a_booboo 8y ago
Nailed it.
cosmie 8y ago
Funny enough, a lot of marketing spiels break out AI as "augmented intelligence". And take the position that it's not their fault if people misinterpret their use of AI as artificial intelligence.

yters 8y ago

Makes sense. Law of information non-growth proves AI cannot create mutual information. Only source we know of is people. This fake AI is the future of the industry.

phreeza 8y ago
I guess you are talking about the second law of thermodynamics? Even humans don't violate that, the have to get the energy for generating information from somewhere, and that increases entropy.
- yters 8y ago
  No, Leonid Levin's law of information non growth in algorithmic information theory. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17986929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17986929

icelancer 8y ago

The actual Mechanical Turk.

etaioinshrdlu 8y ago

I have priced some popular computer vision APIs and found you can get a human in southeast Asia to do the work cheaper... Something seems wrong with that!!!

captain_perl 8y ago
OpenCV is free and used for important projects at companies including Yahoo! and others.
- zo1 8y ago
  OpenCV won't do the recognition/task for you, which is what the OP was referring to. In a nutshell, it's a bunch of useful tools/building-blocks. It's up to you to use them in the right way, and then apply CV algorithms + training so that it can do something.

tabbott 8y ago

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 likely a quick-and-dirty logistic regression than what most people think of as "interesting AI". The actual approach is a perfectly reasonable business strategy, because (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 (B) the company can prove there's commercially significant demand for the user experience that they hope to be able to eventually do with some algorithms/AI technology, and thus can attract investor capital for making the thing actually work (potentially years later). In some cases, the human-powered product might actually be really good, and the economics might work in. But it really sucks that the general hype around AI has generated a whole category of "AI companies" that don't actually use any AI technology. The dishonesty is really poor (I have a friend who's actually a machine learning expert start a job at one of these companies, and only then discover that the company did not use machine learning and no technical plans to do in the next year and actually just wanted another web developer... which obviously resulted in my friend quitting). That said, I expect the trend to continue as long as companies get lots of extra press and investor attention for claiming to be an AI company.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
cough cough Palantir.
- thelastbender12 8y ago
  Curious, is what the article describes illegal? Or just false marketing.
  - kgc 8y ago
    False advertisement is also illegal.

Mr_P 8y ago

This 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_claims/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/18/pinscreen_fraud_cla...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
JimDabell 8y ago
> This isn't the first time something like this has happened. This has been happening for centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

DonHopkins 8y ago

I always suspected that Emacs's Doctor AI knew a bit too much about RMS's hangups and inhibitions. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html

AlexandrB 8y ago

As Uber proved: AI is hard, but labor arbitrage is easy.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

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 work in China as well. If they go with a blatantly pro-government message, they will be ignored by anyone critical of the Chinese government. So instead, they come in agreeing with critical positions and redirect sentiment from there. So if you ever hear someone who sounds like a wumao, they are probably just overzealous nationalists and not shills. [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-tone-is-chinas-latest-party-approved-outlet-humanizing-news/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-t...

paradite 8y ago
> 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/ https://foreignpolicy.com/author/bethany-allen-ebrahimian/ Seems pretty one-sided. And her twitter: https://twitter.com/BethanyAllenEbr 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 her reporting while we are on this topic of "wumao". I am also not targeting Foreign Policy as a news media, as Foreign Policy itself doesn't seem to suffer from bias against China as a whole, as there are other authors that are either more neutral or biased towards China: https://foreignpolicy.com/tag/tea-leaf-nation/ https://foreignpolicy.com/tag/tea-leaf-nation/ https://foreignpolicy.com/author/melissa-chan/ https://foreignpolicy.com/author/melissa-chan/ https://foreignpolicy.com/author/ran-jijun/ https://foreignpolicy.com/author/ran-jijun/ Edit: Attempt to remove personal attacks in the comment. Edit 2: Remove the section about myself.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  start out with an overtly critical almost "ad hominem attack" position, include your own stance in the course of your argument and redirect sentiment-in this case trying to garner sympathy for yourself for being attacked as a wumao. you're either actually a wumao or are too afraid to actually take a reasoned stance. i had never heard of the term before this thread but makes sense, i'm reading a lot more content like this nowadays wondering what exactly the author is arguing about

agibsonccc 8y ago

I was a speaker at a conference they were doing live annotation for. (http://waic2018.com/index-en.html http://waic2018.com/index-en.html) See slide deck here for proof: https://www.slideshare.net/agibsonccc/world-artificial-intelligence-conference-shanghai-2018 https://www.slideshare.net/agibsonccc/world-artificial-intel... Beyond that, commenting on the translation a bit. They did live translation the first day of WAIC for the headline speakers. There were 2 screens, 1 was baidu and the other was iflytek. Neither were that good on the english side (it was ok..but could barely keep up with the speakers) They claim they are still working on english. The grammar output wasn't coherent. IFlytek itself has some neat hardware they sell that is pretty good. Beyond that, it seems like they are mainly collecting data right now. I would not be surprised they were doing this just for marketing visibility. It is easy to fake. Happy to answer questions about the experience there if people would find it useful.

eksemplar 8y ago

Being 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 still need people to qualify what it came up with and build the things it didn’t. We’ve run proof of concepts on stuff like traffic, and a small startup with a relationship with a university, build a route prediction thing that would make it easier to avoid jams. It worked, but it frankly didn’t work better than what our traffic department was already doing, using simple common sense. So we diverted the project to work on traffic light control for maximum flow, and it turned out that the settings our engineers had come up with were already optimal. Only our engineers had come up with the same results, using less resources. I’m beginning to think of AI as mostly hype. It does have some uses, like for recognition. We use ML and image recognition to troll through millions of old case files for various purposes. We use speech recognition to help people with dyslexia. But for analytics and prediction it’s been extremely useless compared to actual people. I’d love to be convinced otherwise by the way. If it actually does something, I’d like to be on the forefront with it so I don’t have to play catch up when Deloitte sells it to the mayor. But I have to admit that after 5 years of AI bullshit bingo I’m one sales meeting away from labeling AI in the same category as blockchain.

sgt101 8y ago
I think it depends on what you call AI and where you want to use it. Many people focus on "automation" - so do the analytics that an analyst would otherwise do. But as you note, mostly automation, workflow, analytic or chat, is only able to do very routine tasks, and it's still quite expensive to deploy. Another issue is that often when you tackle these domains it turns out that a commonsense non-technical approach is almost as good. On several occasions I've seen it's just a case of "stop doing that". On the other hand AI can be a powerful tool or assistant when humans are struggling with a task. AI that (for example) highlights all the suspicious places in an oncology image after an oncologist has had a look and labelled it as showing cancer could improve quality of outcome. I am deeply suspicious of people who want to chop the oncologist out though! More prosaically prediction systems to estimate future customer churn, identify sales opportunities (or in the public service case demand for services and needs), future traffic flows, complex settings for complex devices (especially in the face of change), diagnostics of problems, reasoning over millions of records, are all valuable. Often the theme is "can we make a very narrow very specialist component that could come to the same conclusions that a reasonably smart three year old would if we could make her concentrate and do it millions of times". So a bit smart, very autistic, very fast. What you will not do is create value from consultancy and procurement; you need to build a capability to get the value, and that is a slow, expensive and strategic game - think 4 high cost (but don't be bullshitted there are great people who will work for reasonable amounts out there so long as you don't expect them to be slaves and make bombs or crash the financial system - think doctor or lawyer cost and recruit with the support of your uni) fte for three years. If that is too expensive then I think it's going to be a waste of your time for now, and your current stance of sceptical openness is the right thing to do - eventually someone will come with a convincing shrink wrapped offer that is right for your domains, at the right price - then all is good.

tannhaeuser 8y ago

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 and its competitors. We've really put the car before the horse in so many ways on the 'net, to stay with a metaphor from orientalism.

TekMol 8y ago
The first 10 DuckDuckGo images are all about the chess playing turk: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mechanical+turk&t=h_&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mechanical+turk&t=h_&iax=images&ia...
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  That's why I wrote text search.
  - TekMol 8y ago
    And because of what the text search returns you cannot link to an illustration?
    - tannhaeuser 8y ago
      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.
      - TekMol 8y ago
        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

PhilipA 8y ago

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.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
You might care as an investor, lest great consumer experience come from burning through VC. As an anology, if Uber claimed to have self driving taxis, but actually had people hiding in boxes driving them, that would be investment fraud. The promise of AI has always been not better experiences, but similar human touched experiences for a much cheaper cost.
- PhilipA 8y ago
  My comment was merely mad as a consumer.
- semerda 8y ago
  I'm on the fence about that... Take a look at Receipt Bank privacy policy https://www.receipt-bank.com/privacy-policy/ https://www.receipt-bank.com/privacy-policy/ -- search "data extraction team" and their mega $50M funding from US investors in 2017. I have found around 90% of accounting products do this and no one snuffles or maybe all that money is going into hiding this fact and buying off "influencers".. ok I will shut up now ;-)
talltimtom 8y ago
You don’t Care but some consumers will care that it’s real people going through all their data and not just a machine. And claiming to have AI but using manual labor is straight up investor fraud on a Theranos level.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
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.

rdlecler1 8y ago

You expect AI to get better over time and it doesn’t make arbitrary errors. I’ve been using x.ai for awhile and it has actually gotten worse. They always say that it’s algorithms (let’s lie to our customers twice!). Algorithms don’t mistake Tuesday for Wednesday.

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cuboidGoat 8y ago

They appear to have stolen the plot of the film "Shooting Fish". Trailer - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120122/videoplayer/vi2760311065 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120122/videoplayer/vi276031106...

swingline-747 8y ago
Damnit or good... someone else remembers this. Oh well. Maybe they should've tried trading a red paperclip for a house?

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago

would services that learn from recaptcha be considered as utilizing machine learning or no? I mean, it is humans who power that technically...

inputcoffee 8y ago

Reverse Turing: people with such narrowly defined work that an unbiased observer cannot distinguish them from an AI

ricokatayama 8y ago

We are expecting too much to have AI solving all of our problems, when we should have develop tech to help us to achieve more with less. This is a huge mistake that many companies are falling on, they are trying to sell us a Jarvis when actually what they have is some (good) algorithms

m_herrlich 8y ago

It's all done by Algorithms! This guy's name is Algorithm, and this guy, and these other guys...

rabidrat 8y ago
This guy's name is al-Khwarizmi..

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kozikow 8y ago

I didn't use manual labeling during pilots for ML-based service and I regret it after the fact. Your customer cares about a business value. From my experience using buzzwords like "AI" will only get your foot in the door, but in the end, the business value will sell. IMO it's a completely valid business strategy if you are selling something at cost with the plan of reducing the cost later and you can stay solvent in the meantime.

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