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.

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