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What Microsoft and Google Are Not Telling You About Their A.I.
Just how much of A.I. is artificial, and how much is manual labor?
In September of 2018, iFlytek, a Chinese technology company and world leader in A.I. — particularly in voice recognition software — was accused of disguising human translation as machine translation during a tech conference in Shanghai. The whistleblower was an interpreter, Bell Wang, who was doing live translation at the conference. He noticed that iFlytek was using his translations as live subtitles on a screen next to the company’s brand logo. This gave the appearance that the translated output was produced by their A.I. system, rather than by Wang.
The company was also broadcasting the translations live online using a computer-synthesized voice, instead of the original human interpreters’ voices. Wang took pictures and videos as evidence. Then, he posted them to Zhihu, a Chinese blogging platform, and accused iFlytek of fraud. This led to a media frenzy and debate over the iFlytek’s PR and marketing tactics. The company claimed to have developed cutting-edge technology — but Wang’s report threw all that into question.
You may not have heard of iFlytek. In 2017, MIT Technology Review named it the world’s “sixth-smartest company” — the highest ranked company from China, just…
