Comment by palmotea

9 days ago

> 5) Uh-oh, the model is underperforming, and the human worker pipeline is now some significant part of the full workflow.

AI stands for "Actually, Indians."

54 comments

palmotea

Reply
K0balt  9 days ago

This has been a running joke in several projects I have been involved in, each time, apparently independently evolved. I never bring it up, but I am amused each time it appears out of the zeitgeist. It’s actually the best Kind of ironic humor, the kind that exposes a truth and a lie at the same time, with just enough political incorrectness to get traction.

I can’t even count the number of of times I have shut down “AI” projects where the actual plan was to use a labor pool to simulate AI, in order to create the training data to replace the humans with AI. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a terrible idea for some cases, but you can’t just come straight out of the gate with fraud. Well, I mean, you could. But. Maybe you shouldn’t.

jansan  9 days ago

Or it should be changed to MT -> Mechanical Turk

"Our bleeding edge AI/MT app..." does not sound bad at all.

  • rk06  9 days ago

    It might fool general public, but the moment "Mechanical Turk" is uttered, some of us would ask "is this done by human?"

evnix  9 days ago

[flagged]

  • perching_aix  9 days ago

    Try replacing it with Germans, and now it sounds like a praise, because the stereotype around Germans and Germany is that way.

    Is your problem that their phrasing invites stereotyping, or that the stereotype it invites happens to be negative? Because if it's the latter, do you really think that's the semantic intention here?

    • evnix  9 days ago

      I get that the intention was not harmful, but i am trying to make the poster understand how people might feel.

      Regarding Germans, if the news was, "AG deportation private company is a scam, they were sending people to forced euthanasia"

      and someone came and said, "AG stands for Actually Germans". I am sure no German would want to be associated with that.

      5 replies →

  • ohgr  9 days ago

    I’ll add that I’ve heard this before. And it was from an Indian guy and he thought it was absolutely hilarious.

  • FirmwareBurner  9 days ago

    I told this AI joke to my Indian friends and they all laughed and said "true". Get a life, stop being a tone policing hall monitor, IRL people off Twitter aren't as easily offended by innocent jokes as you might think.

    • adriand  9 days ago

      That sounds a lot like the classic “I have lots of black friends” line. But even if you do have Indian friends, there is a big difference between joking with friends vs what is suitable for publication in the public sphere.

      I would also note that OP merely posited a thought experiment. They’re not policing anyone. “Get a life” is perhaps a little harsh?

      Here’s another thought experiment. If you had a job interview for a senior position at Microsoft and your interviewer was Satya Nadella, would you make this joke?

      2 replies →

siva7  9 days ago

[flagged]

  • TeMPOraL  9 days ago

    It's the other way around - it's racist if you're a US American, because in USA every problem is somehow ultimately called or blamed on racism.

    Elsewhere in the world, we'd all it xenophobia, or Indophobia if one has something against Indian people specifically.

    Though in this case, it's driven primarily by economic stereotypes, coming from the country becoming a cheap services outsourcing destination for the West, so there should be a better term coined for it. The anti-Indian sentiment in IT seems to be the services equivalent of the common "Made in China = cheap crap" belief, and because it applies to services and not products, it turns into discriminating people.

    • johnisgood  9 days ago

      It is mainly because the majority of scammers that we hear about are Indian. I am not sure it has anything to do with xenophobia, whether they (or we) call it as such or not.

  • perching_aix  9 days ago

    Nothing racist about it, India is essentially the #1 outsourcing destination. Not everything that involves an explicit mention of ethnicity / origin is racist.

    • evnix  9 days ago

      Not racist but offensive indeed. It's like relating school shootings to white people. A white child sitting in Norway might not relate and may find it offensive and insulting.

      2 replies →

midnightblue  9 days ago

You win the internets, sir.

  • palmotea  9 days ago

    > You win the internets, sir.

    Yes, I did. By repeating someone else's apropos joke, I get to reap the sweet, sweet internet points.

  • midnightblue  8 days ago

    downvoted for nostalgic use of Slashdot vernacular? we don't read these memetic cultural artifacts very often anymore. sometimes, you use them, just to keep them alive as a memento of a bygone era.