Amazon.com's artificial intelligence technology has been revealed to rely heavily on offshore workers from India, sparking controversy over the potential of AI and the company's business ethics.
Amazon has announced that it will be removing its “Just Walk Out” technology from Amazon Fresh stores. Rather than relying on cashiers, the technology claimed to use cameras and sensors to track items customers take with them as they leave the store. Customers can enter a store powered by Just Walk Out by tapping their credit card or scanning their Amazon account at the gate and exit without going to a physical checkout.
Amazon's “Just Walk Out” Website, claimed that the technology “leverages computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning.” However, in recent reports, informationit was revealed that Amazon relies on more than 1,000 human workers from India to track the majority of its purchases.
If the AI cannot make a purchasing decision, employees will be tasked with carefully observing the purchase through video footage. The report details that human agents performed 700 verifications per 1,000 sales in 2022. This far exceeds our internal goal of less than 50 reviews per 1,000.
“The primary role of our machine learning data professionals is to annotate video images, which is necessary to continually improve the functionality of the underlying machine learning models,” an Amazon spokesperson said. said in an interview. gizmodo.
From its inception in 2016, Just Walk Out has had issues. Customers receive a receipt a few hours after purchase.
Critics also pointed out that the technology was too advanced to be true.
“The software has to match an image of a person entering a store with a video of the same person leaving the store.” Software engineer Emmanuel Maggioli said: blog. “This task, called person re-identification, is not easy, but it appears to be fairly mature with today's technology.”
Maggioli's suspicions were proven correct a year later. Amazon spokesperson Sarmishta Ramesh said: daily mail Workers in India say they don't see shoppers live. Employees were needed to “verify a small number of shopping visits where our computer vision technology cannot determine individual purchases with complete confidence.”
This revelation is a reminder that some aspects of AI are not always advertised with complete honesty. Hiding the truth is not only false advertising and a potential invasion of privacy, but also unethical and disrespectful to human workers. These outsourced jobs are often low-paying and stressful.
Amazon is not the only company caught using human labor. OpenAI,Co., Ltd According to Time magazine, the company employs Kenyan workers and pays them less than $2 an hour to remove harmful language from ChatGPT. General Motors' cruise service's seemingly driverless vehicles are found This means that humans are used as remote support.
Although this critical component of Amazon was exposed, Amazon Continue We use AI technology in Amazon Go stores, sports stadiums, and some Amazon Fresh stores in the UK. For stores that are phasing out Just Walk Out, the company plans to replace it with Dash Cart, a shopping cart with a checkout screen and built-in scanner.
