“Potemkin AI,” Jathan Sadowski’s term for what he calls “services that purport to be powered by sophisticated software, but actually rely on humans somewhere else acting like robots.” Making up the “human cloud,” those humans can be recruited from anywhere and paid very little for their time. Mueller mentions the case of Sama (formerly Samasource), which recruits low-wage workers from Kibera, Kenya (believed to be Africa’s largest informal settlement), to do the dull and endless work of entering data into a machine-learning system.
