When your teleoperator calls it quits and removes their VR googles, the ghost literally leaves the shell.

A Tesla puppet, obviously constrained to handing out water bottles at some promotional party, got a massive failure and landed flat on its back when its telepresence operator, probably paid minimum wage in country with very little labour laws, decided to remove its gear.

#Fauxtomation at its best.

(source: https://bsky.app/profile/jjvincent.bsky.social/post/3m7hps4h2x22r )

https://slapmybot.xuv.be/2025/12/09/logging-off/

#abuse #fauxtomation #puppet #Tesla

"The familiar narrative is that artificial intelligence will take away human jobs: machine-learning will let cars, computers and chatbots teach themselves - making us humans obsolete.

Well, that's not very likely, and we're gonna tell you why. There's a growing global army of millions toiling to make AI run smoothly. They're called "humans in the loop:" people sorting, labeling, and sifting reams of data to train and improve AI for companies like Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. It's gruntwork that needs to be done accurately, fast, and - to do it cheaply – it's often farmed out to places like Africa –

Naftali Wambalo: The robots or the machines, you are teaching them how to think like human, to do things like human.

We met Naftali Wambalo in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the main hubs for this kind of work. It's a country desperate for jobs… because of an unemployment rate as high as 67% among young people. So Naftali, father of two, college educated with a degree in mathematics, was elated to finally find work in an emerging field: artificial intelligence."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/labelers-training-ai-say-theyre-overworked-underpaid-and-exploited-60-minutes-transcript/

#Kenya #AI #GenerativeAI #Fauxtomation #DataLabeling #OpenAI #Meta

#AI #GenerativeAI #ContentModeration #Fauxtomation #Automation #Chatbots: "Mojez: Why is human labour crucial for the functioning of AI systems and what does your work prevent from happening? Do you think human workers like you will always be involved in the AI supply chain?

Mophat: Human labour is essential for AI systems to function effectively as it ensures the accuracy, fairness, and ethical standards of algorithms. My work as a contract moderator was to prevent harmful or inappropriate content from being disseminated. This safeguarded users from exposure to offensive and misleading information. For instance, if you want to generate text about child molestation, this tool will not be able to provide that kind of information. That’s because of our work. While advancements in AI automation are ongoing, human workers will likely continue to play a crucial role in the supply chain, especially if the task requires decision-making. You know, these machines don’t have the capability to make decisions themselves. And these AI systems are not empathetic and don’t give context. Because these machines lack essential human judgement and critical thinking, people will continue to work on them."

https://dingdingding.org/issue-7/interview-the-human-cost-of-ai/

#Fauxtomation #Marketing #SelfDrivingCars #AI : "Rather than getting angry with marketers for tricking them, reporters are ventriloquized into repeating the marketing claim that these aren't lies, they're premature truths. Sure, today these are faked, but once the product is refined, the fakery will no longer be required.

This must be the kinds of Magic Underpants Gnomery the credulous press engaged in during the jetpack days: "Sure, a 21-second rocket belt is totally useless for anything except wowing county fair yokels – but once they figure out how to fit an order of magnitude more high-explosive onto that guy's back, this thing will really take off!"

The AI version of this is that if we just keep throwing orders of magnitude more training data and compute at the stochastic parrot, it will eventually come to life and become our superintelligent, omnipotent techno-genie. In other words, if we just keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, eventually one of our prize mares will give birth to a locomotive:"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

#AI #GenerativeAI #HumanInTheLoop #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

#AI #Automation #Work #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "As anthropologist Lilly Irani observes, labor is not replaced by machines, it’s merely displaced. While stocks surge upon restructuring, few companies achieve this promise of savings and profitability, and “bullshit jobs” soar.

The story of AI distracts us from these familiar unpleasant scenes. Instead, we envision a glistening “future of work” in which we are all miraculously more efficient, our workplaces are populated with relentlessly pleasant robots, and expert automated agents fulfill our every command. Pundits talk loftily about the “ethics of AI” as if it’s a technical question of ironing out its biases or building BB-8 instead of The Terminator.

But the future of work is not a technology: it’s an arrangement. An arrangement of people, capital, and workers that moves jobs from where they are expensive and highly-paid, to where they can be cheap and menial. “AI” is a powerful decoy, lest we start thinking about where those jobs have already gone – offshore – and who moved them there in the first place. Because robots aren’t “taking our jobs” – people are.

We should be wise to the shiny veneer of new technologies and futuristic promises in pitches about “AI.” This is simply old wine in a new bottle. And as the Amazon case makes clear, it’s already turned to vinegar." https://www.techpolicy.press/dont-be-fooled-much-ai-is-just-outsourcing-redux/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Globalization #Fauxtomation #LowWages: "Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

#AI #Fauxtomation #Podcasts: "The estate of George Carlin has filed a federal lawsuit against the comedy podcast Dudesy for an hour-long comedy special sold as an AI-generated impression of the late comedian. But a representative for one of the podcast hosts behind the special now admits that it was actually written by a human.

In the lawsuit, filed by Carlin manager Jerold Hamza in a California district court, the Carlin estate points out that the special, "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead," (which was set to "private" on YouTube shortly after the lawsuit was filed) presents itself as being created by an AI trained on decades worth of Carlin's material. That training would, by definition, involve making "unauthorized copies" of "Carlin's original, copyrighted routines" without permission in order "to fabricate a semblance of Carlin’s voice and generate a Carlin stand-up comedy routine," according to the lawsuit.

"Defendants’ AI-generated 'George Carlin Special' is not a creative work," the lawsuit reads, in part. "It is a piece of computer-generated click-bait which detracts from the value of Carlin’s comedic works and harms his reputation. It is a casual theft of a great American artist’s work.""

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/