Scholars Mind

Fake It Till You Make It

Some companies have even sold products and services that still secretly relied on people to function properly. Amazon’s AI-powered cashiers at their “Just Walk Out” grocery stores were actually overseen by thousands of low-paid workers; Fireflies.ai makes millions a year selling automated notetaking at meetings, but recently revealed that at first their powerful AI was just the founders listening in and writing stuff down. Look for similar cases, then discuss with your team: should companies be punished for releasing successful products and services that once relied on human intervention but no longer do? Is “fake it ‘til you make it” justified as long as you make it in the end?

Key concepts

AI-washing
Selling human work as artificial intelligence. The product is real and the customer's experience is real; the machine in the description is people.

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Every work — at a glance

  • Amazon 'Just Walk Out' — Amazon (product)

    Cashier-less shops sold as pure computer vision — take what you want and walk out — while more than a thousand workers in India watched the video and labelled what shoppers had picked up.

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What to know

  1. 01
    The chess cabinet has become a business model, but the two cases here part company. Amazon sold computer vision to the public and delivered a thousand reviewers in India, and as late as mid-2022 still needed about 700 human checks per 1,000 sales. Fireflies' founder says the few early customers were friends who knew a human was in the loop. Same mechanism; only one of them has a misled customer in it.

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Across subjects

Pop music has already run this experiment. Milli Vanilli won the 1990 Best New Artist Grammy for a record whose vocals were sung by studio musicians the

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

Amazon told the public a camera was watching; a thousand people in India were. Fireflies told friends a bot would join, and they knew better. Same trick, and only one of them leaves a misled customer behind. Does 'we made it in the end' settle anything the disclosure had not already settled?

Practice — a sample

ARTSongwriters release demos as demos; Fireflies sold hand-typed notes as AI. Their key difference is the one NOT shared —

  • A The hurry
  • B The roughness
  • C The skill
  • D The description
  • E The order

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