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...and then lower your costs by building a real AGI to pretend to be humans pretending to be AI.

(Has anyone done this particular sci-fi plot?)

Yes, in the book Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark! (An AGI is implemented that makes money on Amazon Mechanical Turk.)

I pitched a local language startup idea to a few companies. I was summarily tolf that it didn't have any "zing" to it. So I added "AI" in all my pitches and got a lot of interest.

Didn't pursue the idea further because I didn't really believe in it, but it just proved to me that investors often chase buzzwords instead of ideas

There are a few of these already - Mechanical Turk is the most famous.

https://testzap.com does exactly that for app testing, although there are few products in market claiming to do AI based testing.

There was an article on here like two days ago about a company in Kenya that does training sets for big tech. 1000s of people marking cars on pictures etc