Amazon.com Inc.’s artificial intelligence technology was revealed to heavily rely on the work of offshore workers from India, creating controversy on AI’s potential and the company’s business ethics.
Amazon announced it will ditch its “Just Walk Out” technology in Amazon Fresh stores. The technology claimed to use cameras and sensors to track the items customers were leaving the store with instead of relying on cashiers. A customer could walk into a Just Walk Out powered store by tapping a credit card or scanning their Amazon account at the entry gate, walking out without visiting a physical cashier.
On Amazon’s Just Walk Out website, it claimed the technology “leverages computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning.” However, in a recent report from The Information, it was revealed that Amazon was relying on over 1,000 human workers from India to track the majority of purchases.
The workers would do the job of closely observing purchases through video footage when AI could not determine a purchase. The report details that the human workers were responsible for verifying 700 out of every 1,000 sales in 2022. This is far higher than their internal goal of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000.
“The primary role of our Machine Learning data associates is to annotate video images, which is necessary for continuously improving the underlying machine learning model powering,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an interview with Gizmodo.
From its start in 2016, Just Walk Out had issues. Customers would receive receipts hours after their purchase.
Critics also pointed out the technology seemed too advanced to be true.
“The software needs to match the images of the person walking into the store with the footage of the same person walking out,” Emmanuel Maggiori, a software engineer, said in their blog. “This task, called person re-identification, is not easy but seems to be quite mature in today’s technology.”
Maggiori’s suspicions were proven correct a year later. An Amazon spokesperson, Sarmishta Ramesh, said to the Daily Mail that workers in India have not been watching shoppers live. The workers were needed to “validate a small minority of shopping visits where our computer vision technology cannot determine with complete confidence an individual’s purchases.”
The revelation serves as a reminder that some aspects of AI are not always advertised with complete honesty. Not only is concealing the truth false advertising and potentially an invasion of privacy, but it is also unethical and disrespectful to human workers. This form of work by outsourcing people is often low-paying and stressful.
Amazon is not the only company that has been exposed for using human labor. OpenAI, Inc. has been using Kenyan workers to remove harmful language from ChatGPT and paying them less than two dollars an hour, according too Time Magazine. General Motor Co.’s Cruise Service’s seemingly driverless rides were found to be using humans as remote assistance.
Although this key component of Amazon was exposed, Amazon continues using AI technology in its Amazon Go stores, sports stadiums and a few Amazon Fresh stores in the United Kingdom. As for places where Just Walk Out is being phased out, the company will replace Just Walk Out with “Dash Carts,” a shopping cart with built-in checkout screens and scanners.
