
The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work - raleighm
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/06/artificial-intelligence-ai-humans-bots-tech-companies
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zhte415
This is not a new thing. In a former company there was the legendary story of
how, in the early 2000s, a failing project to do signature recognition OCR was
turned around within half a year by a new project manager. Only on audit of
payroll a few years later was it discovered the 3rd party tech demanding
highish annual licence fees was infact a team of around 10 people doing a
mechanical turk. It would have worked would it had been a truly 3rd party
service, but since this was customer data, governance rules required
employees.

This was in finance, where regulatory controls tend to be quite strict.

Today, where lines are much more blurred, it seems governance of 3rd party
human access to individual data seems woefully behind.

