Amazon's 'just walk out' checkout tech was powered by 1,000 Indian workers

https:// www.business-standard.com /companies/news/amazon-s-just-walk-out-checkout-tech-was-powered-by-1-000-indian-workers-124040400463_1.html

India @lemmy.ml Amazon's 'just walk out' checkout tech was powered by 1,000 Indian workers

43 comments

So-called "AI" is usually just a scam to hide human labor. The reality is this tech is not usable wthiout human curation, often requiring even more human labor than just doing things the old fashioned way.

When is this bubble going to pop?

27
- They just failed to mention that their “AI” stand for “All Indians”
  
  37
  
  Damn this is good
  
  5
- I think its a bit more complex than that: you are right, but just in the beginning... after the AI is trained you dont need the cheap labor anymore. Which imho makes it even worse.
  
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  Marketing hype.
  
  No amount of training can ever eliminate the need for human curation. This is not AI, it's a jumped up pattern recognition engine. False positives and false negatives are inevitable without a consciousness to evaluate it. Hallucinations are an intractable problem that can not be solved, regardless of training, and so all these AI can ever be is a tool for human workers.
  
  It'll take something totally different and new.
  
  2
- This is not true at all. Transformer models like ChatGPT have already proven to be immensely useful and helpful in the professional world. It's not capable of doing jobs entirely on its own yet, but as a tool that helps humans do their job it's great.
  
  5
  
  Reread what I said. I said it's not usable without human curation i.e. what humans do when they use it as a tool to do their job.
  
  1
- I can’t stand it when I see all these mainstream news stories about it all the time either. With tech ingnorant news anchors talking about it. Just continues pumping up the bubble. I worry rather than pop, it will just be a new buzzword that is here to stay. (AI was always a thing, but what we have now, these LLMs, are not really what we traditionally referred to as AI in scifi and traditional media.)
  
  2
People don't read. And before you down vote, it's still bad.

It was not a human system that was posing as AI. It was a shitty AI that needed a lot of human intervention.

Yes, it's still shit. Yes it's still a problem with how they implemented it and how they pitched it.

But there needs to be a higher level of criticism. Saying "it was just human labor the whole time" is flatly incorrect. The better criticism is the truth... They made AI so shitty that it needed a bunch of human interaction, and their product was really really bad.

I've heard so many people state this as "there wasn't any AI, it was just humans watching cameras." And the false narrative distracts from the real story.

People pretend the truth doesn't matter, and will retreat to "well even if it was AI it was so bad so I was still basically right." and that's a problem.

23
- When your technology is so garbage you need a squishy meatbag to hold its ay thetic hand...oof
  
  2
What's old is new again: "The Mechanical Turk".

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- I'm going to tell you something depressing - those workers have a four-year degree, and are unemployed by now, like 83% of the Indian youth.
  
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- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
  
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So the so called Amazon "Ai" is "An indian"?

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- Alot Indians
  
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  6
I was under the impression that mechanical Turks were powered by Turkish people, not Indians.

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