Published in AI

Google might have faked its AI demo

by on21 May 2018


And the moon landings never happened

The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth yarn claiming that Google’s AI demo last week was a fake.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s unnerving demonstration of the company’s new virtual-assistant technology, Google Duplex, rattled the nerves of many people who worried about the implications of using AI tech.

It showed a very realistic sounding AI booking an appointment at the hairdresser for its owner with the person calling unaware it was chatting to a machine.

However, the Tame Apple Press smelt a rat. Although Google’s Assistant is light years ahead of Apple’s Siri, there is no way that the search engine outfit could beat Apple to that sort of technology because “Apple is best and others smell of Nintendo”.

At no point in Google’s conversations with the businesses did the employees who answered the phone ask for the phone number or other contact information from the A.I.

California requires both parties need to consent to a phone conversation to be legally recorded. This means that Google must have either done it all illegally or got the permission of the businesses before calling them for the demo.

Google isn’t saying and is refusing to name the companies it called.

To the Tame Apple Press that is all it needs to stick the knife into Google. It does not matter that Google has successfully made a lifelike virtual assistant that can replicate human interactions over the phone, what is more important is that the tape was not faked in some way.

The snippets of conversation during Pichai’s demo, which can be heard in the clip, seem too polished and unrealistic to be real, sniffed one Apple fanboy.

This is the same sort of logic which insists that the moon landings are faked and that every school shooting in the US is a government conspiracy using crisis actors. It does not matter if the event happened, it is just that if you want to look hard enough reality has enough holes in it to be exploited. Apple fanboys have important reason to show that Google is not as good as Apple.

There is one thing about this theory which the Tame Apple Press ignored. Google created a PR storm by releasing the tapes. It depicted the sort of life where you could be talking to machines and not being aware of it. It later had to promise that its tech would have to identify itself before talking to real people.

For a fake to be made, Google would have spent a lot of money to create a PR disaster. At some point in doing the project, someone would have pointed out that they were creating an episode of Black Mirror.

Last modified on 21 May 2018
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