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Comment by argonaut | Hacker News Reader

Why is this even a question? According to Facebook itself, it's mostly human-driven.

http://recode.net/2015/11/03/facebooks-virtual-assistant-m-i...

> "The opinion is split as to whether or not it’s a real AI, and there seems to be no way of proving its nature on way or the other."

Clearly, the author didn't even do the most basic fact checking. Since, Facebook clearly told everyone that M was going to be AI that was assisted by humans.

It's literally in the announcement post: https://www.facebook.com/Davemarcus/posts/10156070660595195

> "It's powered by artificial intelligence that's trained and supervised by people."

But that's exactly the point: is it AI trained by people, or people aided by AI tools? It's not the same.

See http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m-works/

Yes, the article is explicit: "For more complicated tasks, such as making a driving test appointment at the DMV, the humans will do most of the heavy lifting. They’ll actually place a call to the DMV."

I think there's a large space where the two are indeed the same.

I think that also depends on who is actually completing/fulfilling the task, in the DMV example its AI adding context to a task that can't be automated easily.

The AI can still do the requirements/information gathering and leaving the job for a person to do. For common issues (support triage, customer service issues) even this still has significant value.

Equally from a training point of view, it may simply be the person correcting/confirming the AI is right, and leaving it to get on with the process, rather than fallover to the human completely.

I suppose the interesting point is more that it's being marketed as not really operated by humans as a positive when in many instance in our modern world the reverse is true. And also it's an interesting application of the Turing Test too. :)

I think it's an interesting exercise in how to prove the level of human involvement in this AI.

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