I think part of why people reacted the way they did is because Amazon (knowingly?) let people believe it was a fully-automated store. I remember reading the launch press and thinking it artfully avoided the issue.
If they'd said "and we just replaced the cashier at 7-11 with people from another country watching you on video" it wouldn't have quite had the same launch buzz...
Totally agreed! It seems that marketing teams have a baseline incentive to oversell the AI abilities of their products to get people excited. Then, for a product like Just Walk Out, you layer on top the privacy-related concerns of camera surveillance by strangers and it makes sense companies are even more hesitant to share that humans are involved.
I think there might be some exceptions, as there are AI companies which emphasize human involvement -- Stitch Fix pops into mind. Yet Stitch Fix's stylists are fundamentally doing data enrichment work (albeit alongside other tasks), creating and annotating training data for new recommender AI models.
I think part of why people reacted the way they did is because Amazon (knowingly?) let people believe it was a fully-automated store. I remember reading the launch press and thinking it artfully avoided the issue.
If they'd said "and we just replaced the cashier at 7-11 with people from another country watching you on video" it wouldn't have quite had the same launch buzz...
Totally agreed! It seems that marketing teams have a baseline incentive to oversell the AI abilities of their products to get people excited. Then, for a product like Just Walk Out, you layer on top the privacy-related concerns of camera surveillance by strangers and it makes sense companies are even more hesitant to share that humans are involved.
I think there might be some exceptions, as there are AI companies which emphasize human involvement -- Stitch Fix pops into mind. Yet Stitch Fix's stylists are fundamentally doing data enrichment work (albeit alongside other tasks), creating and annotating training data for new recommender AI models.