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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.

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

I was making a joke :)

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.

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".