
The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots - floatalong
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-18/the-humans-hiding-behind-the-chatbots
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aresant
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
Isn't this typical of the "Fake it until you have product/market fit, then
automate" ethos?

~~~
aresant
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
> 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

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cb18
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.

~~~
resu_nimda
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)

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seibelj
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
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.

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jessaustin
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
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).

~~~
exolymph
This is my beef with chatbots in general -- it is the rare conversational
interface that has _any_ advantage over a GUI beyond its novelty.

~~~
dunkelheit
Isn't it ironic that chatbots are touted as a more natural, conversational
interface when they are basically CLIs? Back in the day GUI adoption over CLI
was driven by conviction that desktop, drag and drop and point and click are
more natural metaphors.

~~~
burtmacklin
As usual, what's old is new again. Makes sense given that user interfaces and
"styles" of software are just like styles in anything else (ie: fashion) --
they come and go and come back again.

Fast forward another 3 - 7 years and users will be wondering at the marvels of
a chatbot where one can simply click on the picture of the action they'd like
it to perform! Perhaps entire menus of actions will be presented, in
horizontal or vertical strips inside the chat interface... these actions will
of course be represented by hieroglyphs expertly designed to convey just what
they do and no more, to as cross-cultural an audience as possible. Maybe we'll
call them icons or something.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Fast forward another 3 - 7 years and users will be wondering at the marvels
of a chatbot where one can simply click on the picture of the action they 'd
like it to perform!_

You mean like the current functionality of WeChat, Telegram, Kik and
FacebookM?

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stephanheijl
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.

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exolymph
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/5...](https://www.facebook.com/groups/cyberpunkculture/permalink/531331800380538/?comment_id=531332370380481&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R%22%7D)

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Aelinsaar
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
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
Hell, I've been meaning to see that movie anyway, thanks.

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throwawayxai
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.

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YeGoblynQueenne
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.

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anaskar
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.

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

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taneq
"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
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
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.

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388
hi

