Hacker News Reader

Comment by PhilipA | Hacker News Reader

I remember hearing from a colleague that Expensify wasn’t automatically identifying the expenses, but had helped with manual labor. I don’t know if it is true and quite honestly I as a consumer doesn’t care. If some is giving me a good experience which eases my work, I don’t really care if it was done with AI, human labor or magic - as long as it works.

View on HN

You might care if you've chosen Expensify instead of another company in the same space out of expectation that human eyes will not look over your expense data. Of course Expensify's obvious defense will be that they don't explicitly give that guarantee...

But you might also want to care about this on general level. So many bullshit companies doing fake-AI create perception that the technology is much more advanced than it really is; this influences public opinion, and political decisions. Consider e.g. the coming wave of AI-induced job loss, that was such a hot topic just a year or two ago (for some reason it seems to have died down recently). After "Humans Need Not Apply", I expected we'll see significant effects in a decade. These days, I'm much more conservative about the timeframe, because I've learned that most of the immediate fear was based on hype and false advertising of a new statistical gimmick (deep NNs), that in reality only sorta, kinda, works, for some very limited tasks.

You don't care? So if someone in offshore labor camp starts collecting your uber receipts so they gather where you live and your regular movements, then gathers your medical bills (say you did trust that mob) they have nearly enough to do a nice social engineering job on you. You should care. Turkey companies doing this should be exposed so consumers who actually care about their privacy know about them and when their employer forces them to use these apps they can say no and stand up for data-privacy. Just my 2c worth ;-)

ps. Expensify sent images with personal data to Mechanical Turkers, calls it a feature

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/expen...

There are others out there too and you can check out their "Privacy Policies" whether they use "data extraction teams" offshore.

You might care as an investor, lest great consumer experience come from burning through VC. As an anology, if Uber claimed to have self driving taxis, but actually had people hiding in boxes driving them, that would be investment fraud.

The promise of AI has always been not better experiences, but similar human touched experiences for a much cheaper cost.

My comment was merely mad as a consumer.

I'm on the fence about that... Take a look at Receipt Bank privacy policy https://www.receipt-bank.com/privacy-policy/ -- search "data extraction team" and their mega $50M funding from US investors in 2017. I have found around 90% of accounting products do this and no one snuffles or maybe all that money is going into hiding this fact and buying off "influencers".. ok I will shut up now ;-)

You don’t Care but some consumers will care that it’s real people going through all their data and not just a machine. And claiming to have AI but using manual labor is straight up investor fraud on a Theranos level.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com