I don’t have any interesting secrets or facts from my current ex-jobs, so I’ll share an interesting fact from a buddy’s. It’s one of those companies that offers automated phone systems (and chats, nowadays) that listen to your options rather than taking number inputs.
This may no longer be the case, but these systems were not actually automated. There are entire call centers dedicated to these phone systems, whereby an operator listens to your call snippet and manually selects the next option in the phone tree, or transcribes your input.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if advances in AI have made this whole song and dance less in need of human intervention, but once upon a time, your call wasn’t truly automated - it was federated.
Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.
I don’t have any interesting secrets or facts from my current ex-jobs, so I’ll share an interesting fact from a buddy’s. It’s one of those companies that offers automated phone systems (and chats, nowadays) that listen to your options rather than taking number inputs.
This may no longer be the case, but these systems were not actually automated. There are entire call centers dedicated to these phone systems, whereby an operator listens to your call snippet and manually selects the next option in the phone tree, or transcribes your input.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if advances in AI have made this whole song and dance less in need of human intervention, but once upon a time, your call wasn’t truly automated - it was federated.
What? This isn’t true at all! I’ve designed and built these systems. In at least the past 15 years this wasn’t the case, and I’d bet longer.
I call this Machinical Turking
I read this: https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-intelligence-data-notation-labor-scale-surge-remotasks-openai-chatbots
Machine learning has definitely surpassed this, at this point, but yeah, this was a dirty secret in that niche industry for years.