'Pseudo-AI' startups quietly employ humans to do the work their products claim is automated

Some AI startups have worked out that it is cheaper to get humans to behave like robots than to get machines to behave like humans. The Guardian surveys the practice, which Woebot founder Alison Darcy calls the "Wizard of Oz design technique": "a lot of time when it comes to AI, there is a person behind the curtain rather than an algorithm."

The specifics are less abstract than the framing. Edison Software engineers read the personal emails of hundreds of users to improve a "smart replies" feature; its privacy policy did not mention that humans would view them. Expensify admitted that receipts it claimed to process with "smartscan technology" were being posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where a worker tweeted: "I'm looking at someone's Uber receipt with their full name, pick-up and drop-off addresses." Bloomberg found people working 12-hour days pretending to be chatbots for scheduling services like X.ai and Clara, a job so mind-numbing that employees said they were looking forward to being replaced by bots. Facebook's M assistant also relied on humans. ReadMe CEO Gregory Koberger reduced the business model to two steps: hire minimum-wage humans to pretend to be AI pretending to be human, then wait for AI to be invented.