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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Specifically, you should realize anything that companies say is done with "AI" is probably in some part done by poorly paid contractors. And not always on the analysis end, for example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2019/05/28/25-of-go...

There's something incredibly dystopian by using humans as part of a process you literally tell people is entirely machines.

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Haha, I never realised it was that immature.

As an aside: Being a tech I have been asked numerous times by non-techs "What actually is AI?"

I usually answer "a lot of if-statements" :)

AI researcher here. While industry doesn't usually find the need for huge complex models, I don't think your statement is fair, nor accurate. Can you provide some examples of AI tech that in your opinion is "a lot of if statements"?

How do you expect someone to justify a statement that's not true? I suppose you could say that it's a fair characterization of a basic decision tree but that doesn't describe modern ML methods.

The commenter is just referring to the nature of neural networks, a pile of weights and thresholds that you could conceivably write out as a maniacal mess of deeply nested if-statements.

If you're meaning me, I probably should've ended my comment with /s

I was making a joke :)

That's not a fair characterization. These contractors are mostly used for quality assurance. Once you've trained your model (which is not just if statements), you might you send a few thousand examples to raters to judge the true quality of your model.

It is probably something akin to "a lot of if-statements generated by an automated system that we neither understand nor can explain, which seems to more or less output results we wanted".

This reminds me of the great first novel of Russian author Victor Pelevin, Omon Ra. The protagonist joins the Soviet space program (fully automated moon exploration!) and

[spoilers ahead]

learns that the full automation is physical labor by cosmonauts at every stage of the process. No spoilers about the end, it's even better.

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