When AI is a big lie
AI is the hottest selling point of any product now. That's why so many companies are faking it.
Everyone’s worried about AI that does people’s jobs. But what about people who do AI’s jobs?
Builder.ai, a London-based tech startup once valued at $1.5 billion, promised to make building custom apps super easy with AI. The company, founded in 2016 by Sachin Dev Duggal, claimed its AI assistant “Natasha” could design and code software autonomously. Microsoft, the Qatar Investment Authority, and others poured over $450 million into the company. Microsoft announced plans to integrate Builder.ai’s services into its Azure cloud platform two years ago.
But it turns out AI wasn’t building the apps. People were. Nearly 700 engineers in India were manually building apps for customers while pretending to be AI chatbots.
The engineers were told to delay responses to mimic AI processing times and send templated updates like “Natasha is optimizing your request.” Lying was the explicit policy.
The scam ran for eight years, with most of the work done by humans while only basic clerical tasks were handled by software. Last week, it all came undone.
In addition to being liars, the company was also a deadbeat, owing millions to lenders and investors. When their main lender seized money from the company’s accounts, they had to lay off employees, which meant they couldn’t provide their “AI” app-building service.
This kind of thing is more common than people realize.
Remember that “We, Robot” event held by Tesla to showcase cars at Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio lot? At the event, Tesla Optimus robots mingled, poured drinks, danced, and even sang “Happy Birthday” to attendees. The robots seemed to take orders, answer questions, and hand out beverages capably.
In reality, the robots were teleoperated by Tesla employees who were stationed out of sight. When people were impressed by a robot’s ability to converse, they didn’t know they were chatting with some employee.
The AI world is rife with this kind of lying. I’ll give you six more examples.
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