Human involvement is still a necessary component of valuable AI

There is a lot of smoke and mirrors when it comes to artificial intelligence. Don't get me wrong -- AI and machine learning are real, and we use them to solve mission-critical business problems on a massive scale, unlike anything we've seen in the past. For instance, companies apply the technology to solve important matters of data ownership, regulatory compliance, and intellectual property. But too many people and companies these days peddle hype around what they describe as applications of ML or AI that are, in fact, not AI-driven at all. One example of this "faux AI" I spotted recently was a company that described mechanical turks as AI, claiming the system would auto-generate the information via AI processes.