What Is “Pseudo AI”: Humans Disguised As Bots Because Manual Labor Is Cheap

Deploying artificial intelligence to replace human beings is not as easy as it sounds. It has been found that some of the startups and tech companies prefer humans working behind the false label of AI because it is cheap to hire workforce than to build the technology from scratch.

This concept of Pseudo AI has been on the rise lately. According to Gregory Koberger, CEO of ReadME, “using a human to do the job lets you skip over a load of technical and business development challenges. It doesn’t scale, obviously, but it allows you to build something and skip the hard part early on.”

A recent article by the Wall Street Journal reported that many third-party app developers make use of human beings rather than using artificial intelligence to go through the personal messages of users. Citing an example, Edinson Software, a San Jose based company, allowed their “artificial” engineers to scan personal email messages of users to improve a smart replies feature.

This wasn’t the first case. In 2008, a company named Spinvox employed human beings in overseas call centers rather using an AI technology to convert voicemails into text messages posing a threat to privacy, as per a report by The Guardian.

According to a report from Bloomberg in 2016, human beings pretended to be chatbots for calendar scheduling services like X.ai and Clara. The situation was so grave that the workers there had to work strenuously for 12 hours a day and they wished to be replaced by bots.

This pseudo AI has not only been put to use by startups, but tech giants like Facebook have also contributed its fair share to its rise. Facebook’s virtual assistant for Messenger also relied on human beings even after investing heavily in artificial intelligence.

A company named Scale offers a group of workers termed ‘Scalers’ that are used for training AI-powered systems and Self-driven cars, which is justified. But, in other cases, most companies have mastered the art of faking where they lie to the investors about an AI technology in the pipeline to automate the processes but purposely utilize human beings for automating the tasks.

Thinking that artificial intelligence has proliferated our industry and human beings will soon be replaced by robots is a pantomime.

With Google trying to make its assistant more human-like by adding nuances, it would be tough to differentiate human voice from robots’ which further gives opportunities to companies to incorporate Pseudo AI.

Comments

Microsoft To Update Windows ‘Notepad App’ After Years, Teases New Features

E very week or the other, Microsoft releases a new build for the fast ring insiders. The latest Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17713 bring a pack of surprises for Windows users. Redmond always listens to users, and this time, they have heard to Notepad users who were fed up with the uninteresting interface. Microsoft is giving its text editor Notepad new features after a very long time. Yes, the very same app that people use to write random text, create batch files and HTML pages, etc. Among the new Notepad features being added to Windows, you would be able to zoom into text by using the mouse wheel while holding down the Ctrl key. A long requested feature is coming for users; Microsoft is adding ctrl+backspace support to delete a previous word. Other than these, you will now have the ability to wrap around find and replace. Also, the status bar is now enabled by default in Notepad. There are few performance improvements for large...

Google starts rolling out ‘Call Screen’ feature for Pixel smartphones

San Francisco, Dec 2 (IANS) Google has started rolling out a feature for its Pixel smartphones that lets users make use of the Google Assistant to see who is calling and why before they answer a call. The feature allows users to see a real-time transcript of how the caller responds so that they can then decide whether to pick up, respond by tapping a quick reply (for example, “I’ll call you back later”), or mark the call as spam and dismiss. “Call Screen is only available to English speakers in the United States who have Pixel 2, 2 XL, 3, or 3XL devices. If you don’t see Call Screen in the Phone app’s settings, it’s not available yet,” Google said. Call Screen, which can help users save the time spent on picking up unimportant calls from unknown numbers, does not use Wi-Fi or mobile data of the user. This feature does not work with third-party call recording and screen recording apps as these apps may interfere with how the feature works. It is better to turn off these app...

Chrome Web Browser Will Now Use 10% More RAM With Spectre Fix

A new security feature named ‘Site Isolation’ has been introduced for Google Chrome 67 which would nullify the effects of speculative execution side-channel attacks like Spectre. To put things to the perspective, Spectre is one of the two fundamental design flaws in the modern processors, which allow programs to get access to the data for which it is not authorized. Malicious data can exploit this flaw to steal your password and other personal information. What is Site Isolation? The new Site Isolation feature introduced in Google Chrome 67 brings about a fundamental change to Chrome’s architecture. Now, Chrome has changed how its multi-process architecture worked and different tabs used different render processes. According to the new architecture, Chrome limits each renderer process to a single site. By this separation of processes, Google aims to prevent direct memory reading across different processes to safeguard users’ data. According to G...

Tech Knock

Search This Blog