Much 'Artificial Intelligence' is still people behind a screen

The nifty app CamFind has come a long way with its artificial intelligence. It uses image recognition to identify an object when you point your smartphone camera at it. But back in 2015 its algorithms were less advanced: The app mostly used contract workers in the Philippines to quickly type what they saw through a user's phone camera, CamFind's co-founder confirmed to me recently. You would not have guessed that from a press release it put out that year which touted industry-leading "deep learning technology," but did not mention any human labellers. The practice of hiding human input in AI systems still remains an open secret among those who work in machine learning and AI.