Amazon’s AI-run stores were a little too magical to be true

livemint.com:

There’s a grey area in artificial intelligence (AI) filled with millions of humans who work in secret—they’re often hired to train algorithms, but end up operating much of their work instead. These crucial workers took the spotlight this week when The Information reported that Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, which allowed customers to grab grocery items from a shelf and walk out of the store, was being phased out of its grocery stores.

It partially relied on more than 1,000 people in India who were watching and labelling videos to ensure that the checkouts were accurate. Amazon says on its website that Just Walk Out uses “computer vision, sensor fusion and deep learning" but doesn’t mention offshore contractors.

The company told Gizmodo that the workers were annotating videos to help improve them, and that they validated a “small minority" of shopping visits when its AI systems couldn’t determine a purchase. Even so, the Amazon story is a stark reminder that ‘artificial intelligence’ still often requires armies of human babysitters to work properly.

Amazon even has an entire business unit known as Amazon Turk devoted to helping other companies do just that—train and operate AI systems. Thousands of freelancers around the world count themselves as “M-Turkers," and the unit is named after the story of the Mechanical Turk, an 18th-century chess-playing contraption that was secretly controlled by a man hiding inside.

Far from an incident consigned to history, there are plenty more examples of companies that have failed to mention humans pulling the levers behind supposedly cutting-edge AI technology. To name just a few: Facebook famously shut down its text-based virtual assistant M in 2018 after more than two years,