
AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI - ytch
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002956/ai-company-accused-of-using-humans-to-fake-its-ai-
======
tabbott
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.

~~~
Radim
Very frustrating for companies who actually do use machine learning to solve a
problem!

Hard to rise above the background "AI noise" of well-funded marketing.

And people are already fed up with all the AI marketing bullshit; "ebbing tide
sinks all boats".

One way is to offer real-time results via APIs or demos, which cannot be faked
with humans due to sheer latency / volume. Another is to be active in the ML
community (open source etc) to build a reputation. But there the audience is
different (technical), and may not overlap with the business case much.

~~~
blensor
A company that needs to be protected from the market to be successful in this
very same market, isn't this a fallacy?

Trying to create a startup that can't at least compete with the existing
solutions isn't a very good business strategy in my opinion.

That's what academia is for. Research that is still too far away from being
profitable but that has it's merits in the long run.

~~~
sesqu
The claim is that there may be a market for AI-powered technologies, but that
market is suppressed by non-AI competitors exploiting information asymmetry.

~~~
justtopost
Wouldn't that suggest however that AI is not the best tool for the job? AI
should be the great equalizer if the tech actually was useful, but I have seen
precious few examples. The usual triumphs are almost all actually human
sourced and then delivered by algo. (google image, etc.)

~~~
TeMPOraL
No, the point is that dishonest marketing distorts the market. The companies
use human labour to deliver useful services, but falsely advertise as AI-
driven to capitalize on the novelty factor. This makes life more difficult for
both companies delivering the same service, but advertising honestly, and for
companies _actually_ trying to deliver the product by means of AI. The result
is that money flows to dishonest people, instead of honest people and/or
people actually trying to push technology forward.

------
eksemplar
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.

~~~
antpls
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.

~~~
hef19898
I understood the OP in that he put AI and blockchain in the same hype /
bullshit trap category.

~~~
eksemplar
Yes.

------
seanmcdirmid
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-t...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-tone-
is-chinas-latest-party-approved-outlet-humanizing-news/)

~~~
paradite
_> 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.

~~~
abenedic
I think it a little funny that you are attacked for this. Personally I have a
hate for China due to nationalistic reasons, perhaps unreasonably. But it is
good to question the source of information. After all that is the idea of a
free press, no? Should we not all question the source of the information to
find bias? For myself overall, I would say fuck China.

~~~
abenedic
So, HN has a culture of not explaining down votes, but in this case I can only
reason that it is because I said "fuck China". I do not know what experience
the down voter has had with China. Myself I made the mistake of loving a
person who was later imprisoned in a forced labor camp in China. I understand
that that is partly my fault(they were never shy about their beliefs). At some
point though it should be okay for a person with grievances to rail against
the machine that imprisons them and separates them from their desires.

Ask yourself if you have to worry about your love having all their organs
after an act of civil disobedience. I have and do every night. I do not know
how to state that in a way that is palatable.

------
DonHopkins
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)

------
etaioinshrdlu
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
OpenCV is free and used for important projects at companies including Yahoo!
and others.

~~~
zo1
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.

------
Mr_P
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_cla...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/18/pinscreen_fraud_claims/)

~~~
JimDabell
> 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)

------
gattis
artificial artificial intelligence

~~~
cosmie
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.

------
PhilipA
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
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.

~~~
semerda
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 ;-)

------
rdlecler1
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.

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

------
agibsonccc
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-intel...](https://www.slideshare.net/agibsonccc/world-artificial-
intelligence-conference-shanghai-2018)

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.

------
tannhaeuser
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
The first 10 DuckDuckGo images are all about the chess playing turk:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mechanical+turk&t=h_&iax=images&ia...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mechanical+turk&t=h_&iax=images&ia=images)

~~~
tannhaeuser
That's why I wrote text search.

~~~
TekMol
And because of what the text search returns you cannot link to an
illustration?

~~~
tannhaeuser
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
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

------
kozikow
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.

------
icelancer
The actual Mechanical Turk.

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

~~~
swingline-747
Damnit or good... someone else remembers this. Oh well.

Maybe they should've tried trading a red paperclip for a house?

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

~~~
rabidrat
This guy's name is al-Khwarizmi..

------
ricokatayama
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

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

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

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

what

~~~
AstralStorm
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.

------
yters
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
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
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)

