Anything customer-facing and low-latency, like human language translation, image classification, or speech recognition doesn’t seem viable at even modest scale. Anything involving large amounts of data, like analyzing financial data or server logs, seems potentially doable though still unlikely.
In general, it seems like the main advantage of AI products today is either latency of output or size of input, both of which seem difficult to fake by using humans. If a customer has a small amount of input data and wants a small number of results that are indistinguishable from what a trained human would produce, surely they would have no misconceptions about the current state of AI, and would just hire the human to produce it.
Of course a company marketing an online service that sells AI-generated musical compositions could cheat by hiring experienced human composers. But if there’s any money in such a service at all, I expect the customers would want to be able to generate a huge number of compositions, something that humans would probably not be able to do at any appreciable scale. If the customer wanted a single composition that sounded like it was composed by an expert human, I’m pretty sure they would just hire the human.
One thing I certainly could believe is common is human sanity checks on AI output, but that doesn’t strike me as bad or dishonest unless the seller is specifically claiming (for some reason) that no humans are involved. I could also definitely believe that companies fake AI demos for potential investors or future customers.
What types of AI products would be best-suited for humans to be able to viably fake?