AI Fraud - the shabby scams of AI hypesters

[TomBAvoider]

There's a great article in Gizmodo about the modern Mechanical Turk of AI. In one of my previous posts on AI, I mentioned how the claims of self-driving cars being actually controlled remotely by human supervisors reminded me of the Mechanical Turk fraud back in the day, where a machine was allegedly constructed that was supposedly able to play chess, and in reality it had a human chess master hidden inside actually doing the chess moves. 

This article describes 10 such extremely prominent cases of claims made for AI software, app, service where the actual work, the real heavy lifting was done by humans, often surreptitiously. The important thing to remember, is that they don't just involve some small AI startups, but the biggest names in tech, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and of course Elon Musk - this ranged from simply misleading claims to outright fraud. 

The whole field is rife with scams, fraud and hype. You cannot take any AI claims at face value. No doubt there are legitimate AI applications, and there is potential for current and future benefits, but  we are a very, very long way from the insane hype cycle claims out there. Incidentally, it seems even in an area I personally had great hopes for AI in, medical diagnosis, AI has been disappointing - in this case discovering colon cancer from blood samples, where AI transpired to be a dismal failure; oh well, I guess colonoscopies are still the gold standard, and my next colonoscopy is in nine years from now - somehow, I sense that AI will not substitute by reading out blood samples... we'll see, they've got nine years.