#fauxtomation — Public Fediverse posts

"The familiar narrative is that artificial intelligence will take away human jobs: machine-learning will let cars, computers and chatbots teach themselves - making us humans obsolete.

Well, that's not very likely, and we're gonna tell you why. There's a growing global army of millions toiling to make AI run smoothly. They're called "humans in the loop:" people sorting, labeling, and sifting reams of data to train and improve AI for companies like Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. It's gruntwork that needs to be done accurately, fast, and - to do it cheaply – it's often farmed out to places like Africa –

Naftali Wambalo: The robots or the machines, you are teaching them how to think like human, to do things like human.

We met Naftali Wambalo in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the main hubs for this kind of work. It's a country desperate for jobs… because of an unemployment rate as high as 67% among young people. So Naftali, father of two, college educated with a degree in mathematics, was elated to finally find work in an emerging field: artificial intelligence."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/labelers-training-ai-say-theyre-overworked-underpaid-and-exploited-60-minutes-transcript/

#Kenya #AI #GenerativeAI #Fauxtomation #DataLabeling #OpenAI #Meta

#AI #GenerativeAI #HumanInTheLoop #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

#AI #GenerativeAI #HumanInTheLoop #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

#AI #GenerativeAI #HumanInTheLoop #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

#AI #GenerativeAI #HumanInTheLoop #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

#AI #GenerativeAI #HumanInTheLoop #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

#AI #Automation #Work #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "As anthropologist Lilly Irani observes, labor is not replaced by machines, it’s merely displaced. While stocks surge upon restructuring, few companies achieve this promise of savings and profitability, and “bullshit jobs” soar.

The story of AI distracts us from these familiar unpleasant scenes. Instead, we envision a glistening “future of work” in which we are all miraculously more efficient, our workplaces are populated with relentlessly pleasant robots, and expert automated agents fulfill our every command. Pundits talk loftily about the “ethics of AI” as if it’s a technical question of ironing out its biases or building BB-8 instead of The Terminator.

But the future of work is not a technology: it’s an arrangement. An arrangement of people, capital, and workers that moves jobs from where they are expensive and highly-paid, to where they can be cheap and menial. “AI” is a powerful decoy, lest we start thinking about where those jobs have already gone – offshore – and who moved them there in the first place. Because robots aren’t “taking our jobs” – people are.

We should be wise to the shiny veneer of new technologies and futuristic promises in pitches about “AI.” This is simply old wine in a new bottle. And as the Amazon case makes clear, it’s already turned to vinegar." https://www.techpolicy.press/dont-be-fooled-much-ai-is-just-outsourcing-redux/

#AI #Automation #Work #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "As anthropologist Lilly Irani observes, labor is not replaced by machines, it’s merely displaced. While stocks surge upon restructuring, few companies achieve this promise of savings and profitability, and “bullshit jobs” soar.

The story of AI distracts us from these familiar unpleasant scenes. Instead, we envision a glistening “future of work” in which we are all miraculously more efficient, our workplaces are populated with relentlessly pleasant robots, and expert automated agents fulfill our every command. Pundits talk loftily about the “ethics of AI” as if it’s a technical question of ironing out its biases or building BB-8 instead of The Terminator.

But the future of work is not a technology: it’s an arrangement. An arrangement of people, capital, and workers that moves jobs from where they are expensive and highly-paid, to where they can be cheap and menial. “AI” is a powerful decoy, lest we start thinking about where those jobs have already gone – offshore – and who moved them there in the first place. Because robots aren’t “taking our jobs” – people are.

We should be wise to the shiny veneer of new technologies and futuristic promises in pitches about “AI.” This is simply old wine in a new bottle. And as the Amazon case makes clear, it’s already turned to vinegar." https://www.techpolicy.press/dont-be-fooled-much-ai-is-just-outsourcing-redux/

#AI #Automation #Work #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "As anthropologist Lilly Irani observes, labor is not replaced by machines, it’s merely displaced. While stocks surge upon restructuring, few companies achieve this promise of savings and profitability, and “bullshit jobs” soar.

The story of AI distracts us from these familiar unpleasant scenes. Instead, we envision a glistening “future of work” in which we are all miraculously more efficient, our workplaces are populated with relentlessly pleasant robots, and expert automated agents fulfill our every command. Pundits talk loftily about the “ethics of AI” as if it’s a technical question of ironing out its biases or building BB-8 instead of The Terminator.

But the future of work is not a technology: it’s an arrangement. An arrangement of people, capital, and workers that moves jobs from where they are expensive and highly-paid, to where they can be cheap and menial. “AI” is a powerful decoy, lest we start thinking about where those jobs have already gone – offshore – and who moved them there in the first place. Because robots aren’t “taking our jobs” – people are.

We should be wise to the shiny veneer of new technologies and futuristic promises in pitches about “AI.” This is simply old wine in a new bottle. And as the Amazon case makes clear, it’s already turned to vinegar." https://www.techpolicy.press/dont-be-fooled-much-ai-is-just-outsourcing-redux/

#AI #Automation #Work #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "As anthropologist Lilly Irani observes, labor is not replaced by machines, it’s merely displaced. While stocks surge upon restructuring, few companies achieve this promise of savings and profitability, and “bullshit jobs” soar.

The story of AI distracts us from these familiar unpleasant scenes. Instead, we envision a glistening “future of work” in which we are all miraculously more efficient, our workplaces are populated with relentlessly pleasant robots, and expert automated agents fulfill our every command. Pundits talk loftily about the “ethics of AI” as if it’s a technical question of ironing out its biases or building BB-8 instead of The Terminator.

But the future of work is not a technology: it’s an arrangement. An arrangement of people, capital, and workers that moves jobs from where they are expensive and highly-paid, to where they can be cheap and menial. “AI” is a powerful decoy, lest we start thinking about where those jobs have already gone – offshore – and who moved them there in the first place. Because robots aren’t “taking our jobs” – people are.

We should be wise to the shiny veneer of new technologies and futuristic promises in pitches about “AI.” This is simply old wine in a new bottle. And as the Amazon case makes clear, it’s already turned to vinegar." https://www.techpolicy.press/dont-be-fooled-much-ai-is-just-outsourcing-redux/

#AI #Automation #Work #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "As anthropologist Lilly Irani observes, labor is not replaced by machines, it’s merely displaced. While stocks surge upon restructuring, few companies achieve this promise of savings and profitability, and “bullshit jobs” soar.

The story of AI distracts us from these familiar unpleasant scenes. Instead, we envision a glistening “future of work” in which we are all miraculously more efficient, our workplaces are populated with relentlessly pleasant robots, and expert automated agents fulfill our every command. Pundits talk loftily about the “ethics of AI” as if it’s a technical question of ironing out its biases or building BB-8 instead of The Terminator.

But the future of work is not a technology: it’s an arrangement. An arrangement of people, capital, and workers that moves jobs from where they are expensive and highly-paid, to where they can be cheap and menial. “AI” is a powerful decoy, lest we start thinking about where those jobs have already gone – offshore – and who moved them there in the first place. Because robots aren’t “taking our jobs” – people are.

We should be wise to the shiny veneer of new technologies and futuristic promises in pitches about “AI.” This is simply old wine in a new bottle. And as the Amazon case makes clear, it’s already turned to vinegar." https://www.techpolicy.press/dont-be-fooled-much-ai-is-just-outsourcing-redux/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Globalization #Fauxtomation #LowWages: "Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

"The performance of the workers who animate the artifice is obscured by the spectacle of the machine" -- Ayhan Aytes

#Fauxtomation #MTurk

"The performance of the workers who animate the artifice is obscured by the spectacle of the machine" -- Ayhan Aytes

#Fauxtomation #MTurk

"The performance of the workers who animate the artifice is obscured by the spectacle of the machine" -- Ayhan Aytes

#Fauxtomation #MTurk

"The performance of the workers who animate the artifice is obscured by the spectacle of the machine" -- Ayhan Aytes

#Fauxtomation #MTurk

"The performance of the workers who animate the artifice is obscured by the spectacle of the machine" -- Ayhan Aytes

#Fauxtomation #MTurk

#AI #Fauxtomation #GhostWork: "AI’s development so far has been based on the exploitation of workers and users around the world, performing what anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computational social scientist Siddharth Suri call ghost work. This term refers to the undervalued human labor utilized to develop and maintain the automation of websites and apps. Ghost work is characterized by on-demand, short-term projects or tasks performed globally by precarized workers through platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk and specialized companies like Sama. These workers, usually vulnerable people from Asia, Latin America, and Africa, are paid less than $2 per hour to generate and label data that trains AI models. Moreover, users who validate algorithmic outputs or help perfect systems usually do it for free. Ghost work is often outsourced, hidden, or rendered invisible by the tech companies who request it. As Noopur Raval argues, we must ask ourselves how and for whom this work is invisible and what happens when workers are finally seen. In light of these questions, we delve into three nuanced layers of invisibility that pervade data work: the unpaid work performed by users, human workers pretending to be AI systems, and the different forms of exploitation of vulnerable communities globally. Finally, we explore potential avenues for not only rendering this labor visible but also transforming the material conditions under which it takes place."

https://just-tech.ssrc.org/articles/data-work-and-its-layers-of-invisibility/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Google #Bard #Microsoft #ContentModeration #Fauxtomation #GhostWork #WageSlavery: "There’s a certain cruel irony in the fact that as the highest-profile technology in years makes its debut, the ones best suited to keep it on the rails are also the most precarious at the companies that need them. That’s no accident. A chatbot is a sort of magic trick; for the illusion to work properly, the assistants curled up inside the box must remain hidden from the audience, their contribution unremarked.

While Google and Microsoft want you to forget that they exist, for the workers, forgetting doesn’t come so easily."

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-02-16/column-google-microsoft-chatgpt-bard-raters