Matt Novak: This guy says in the replies that this was 7-10 years ago but it makes you wonder how many companies are still doing it like this with 100% human labor. We already know every AI company is doing this with some degree of human intervention, they just call it “training the model.”

This guy says in the replies that this was 7-10 years ago but it makes you wonder how many companies are still doing it like this with 100% human labor. We already know every AI company is doing this with some degree of human intervention, they just call it “training the model.”

I am fairly convinced at least 50% of AI output is in some way mechanical Turk work

If it works reliably I think it's safe to assume it's an underpaid human.

For the most part the bar is low enough and the technology is simple enough that it shouldn't need human intervention. It's an expensive dead end, a scam on almost every level, but if outside of PR trick shots there's no need to fake the majority of what it outputs.

it would not shock me if this is how Waymo works as well

I was sad the day I learned this exists www.mturk.com

Amazon Mechanical Turkwww.mturk.com

yeah, it turns out that like 70% of the time A.I. just stands for An Indian

The companies send the work all over the world, so I'm partial to Actually Individuals.

I agree with "Actually Individuals," especially because India is no longer the lowest cost provider.

This is literally what Amazon did www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

So, Amazon’s ‘AI-powered’ cashier-free shops use a lot of … humans. Here’s why that shouldn’t surprise you | James Bridlewww.theguardian.com This is how these bosses get rich: by hiding underpaid, unrecognised human work behind the trappings of technology, says the writer and artist James Bridle

Remake The Wizard of Oz but behind the curtain it's just Filipino exploitation.

I came here to say exactly this!

This was my first thought as well!

Every time.

Turns out that model hasn't really changed much. www.noemamag.com/the-exploite...

The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence | NOEMAwww.noemamag.com Supporting transnational worker organizing should be at the center of the fight for “ethical AI.”

🧑‍🚀 It's all the Mechanical Turk? 🔫🧑‍🚀 Always has been

A couple financial advisory companies do this as well. Between vaguely pretending plan summaries are written in-house and computer assisted (with clients who are warmer to that), the bulk of a lot of financial plans are written by people in South Asia.

Notably, it's not even that much work, but it's a type of work the median financial advisor has no goddamn idea how to do well themselves, so it's just outsourced.

Personally, I'm grateful I started a lot of work around Diwali. It meant I had to learn that stuff myself because I couldn't bring myself to be the reason this friendly Indian guy had to be overworked around the holiday lmao

This is the ATM money dispensing dwarf joke in real life.

Wired did a docu about Shenzhen several years ago, and they talk about the first ATM in Shenzhen being basically this -- fake it 'til you make it! www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp6F...

IIRC trashfuture podcast has talked about and discovered that a LOT of these companies, not just AI ones, are just using the closest thing they can legally get to slave labor in countries in Africa, or the Philippines, or wherever to do stuff like this, or driving pizza delivery robots, or whatever

It's what Amazon was doing for their "Just walk out" idea at Amazon Fresh locations. arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024...

Amazon Fresh kills “Just Walk Out” shopping tech—it never really workedarstechnica.com "AI" checkout was actually powered by 1,000 human video reviewers in India.

That’s just sparkling outsourcing

I captioned this stupid picture last year, when @kathryntewson.bsky.social was destroying Do Not Pay for their “robot lawyers.” The evidence there seemed pretty strong that they were Mechanically Turk-ing pretty hard in 2023.

Expensify still does this this way

Some tech bro is going to sell fully autonomous war drones that are actually piloted by $2/hr child labor because they read Ender's Game

i know a person who currently does this kind of work, annotating maps, and while they are a very nice and lovely person, i would not risk anything of value based on their assessments

Saw this come across my timeline yesterday on another social media network

A firm providing AI drive-thru tech to fast food chains actually relies on human workers to take orders 70% of the time (December 2023) archive.ph/aE8ZZ

archive.ph

a program I use for work added a new verification tool and were openly like "we hire people in the Philippines to check everything, and they get weekends off and various holidays so here is the expected slowdown days" and I appreciated the honesty.

The cashier less stores just got outed, no?

There was an "AI" 3d model maker that was found to be doing this last year ia.acs.org.au/article/2023...

AI startup ‘magically’ generating 3D images was actually using humansia.acs.org.au Not so magic after all…

After reading the replies, I was interested in the origin of the term “mechanical turk” and the first search result… www.mturk.com

Amazon Mechanical Turkwww.mturk.com

Amazon didn’t create the term.

Oh, sorry, that’s not what I was implying. I was just surprised that they’re directly offering the discussed humans-for-training-models as a service.

I recall a thing in the early 2000s where some airlines were using a "voice recognition" system that just played the caller's voice to a call center in the phillipines staffed by people who did not speak english, but were just trained by rote to hit the appropriate button on their screens

Intuit has been lobbying for years to keep people from getting their taxes done by the government like in other countries, and this fact right here should be enough reason to bury them and their lobbyists as we move into a future where we just get a receipt or bill.

If you liked mechanical Turks, wait until you see mechanical Pinoys

I came across this ad recently. If it continues to cost this much to keep the ruse going, they'll be bankrupt before long.

Get an Amazon Turk account and find out

Have you heard of mechanical turking? It sounds racist and is based on a super computer that was actually a box with a dude in it. Anyway that's what this is and it's still happening and when I said it sounded racist I was laughed out of the room.

Didn't it turn out that there were two remote workers overseeing each Cruise "self driving" car?

Doesn’t AI stand for “absent Indians”? Not my joke btw…

I used to be the person behind a service that sends shipping confirmation emails for all direct orders for a clothing company. They were Worried, when I started that gig and used copy-paste to move the info around rather than 10-keying it in, which they felt was faster and more accurate.

I also hand-edited the inventory spreadsheets that got sent to amazon for their amazon orders.

but yeah, any service that takes a variable amount of time to work likely has a human person on the other end of it. Especially when there's a name attached to the confirmation email.

Wasn't that weird checkoutless amazon store in trouble for doing literally this not too long ago?

You're absolutely correct. They are ALL using cheap labor in places like India and Africa to do the tagging/labeling of the data for "training" their software. It's very exploitative, and they are heavily misrepresenting what their "AI" can actually do.

Amazon fresh

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