- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Bombshell new reporting from 404 Media found that Flock, which has its cameras in thousands of US communities, has been outsourcing its AI to gig workers located in the Philippines.
After accessing a cache of exposed data, 404 found documents related to annotating Flock footage, a process sometimes called “AI training.” Workers were tasked with jobs include categorizing vehicles by color, make, and model, transcribing license plates, and labeling various audio clips from car wrecks.
In US towns and cities, Flock cameras maintained by local businesses and municipal agencies form centralized surveillance networks for local police. They constantly scan for car license plates, as well as pedestrians, who are categorized based on their clothing, and possibly by factors like gender and race.
In a growing number of cases, local police are using Flock to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surveil minority communities.
It isn’t clear where all the Flock annotation footage came from, but screenshots included in the documents for data annotators showed license plates from New York, Florida, New Jersey, Michigan, and California.
Flock joins the ranks of other fast-moving AI companies that have resorted to low-paid international labor to bring their product to market. Amazon’s cashier-free “just walk out” stores, for example, were really just gig workers watching American shoppers from India. The AI startup Engineer.ai, which purported to make developing code for apps “as easy as ordering a pizza,” was found out to be selling passing human-written code as AI generated.
The difference with those examples is that those services were voluntary — powered by the exploitation of workers in the global south, yes, but with a choice to opt out on the front-end. That isn’t the case with Flock, as you don’t have to consent to end up in the panopticon. In other words, for a growing number of Americans, a for-profit company is deciding who gets watched, and who does the watching — a system built on exploitation at either end.
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That headline just keeps getting bleaker as it goes.
Let the unregulated “free” (for some!) market ruled by the winners decide.
The billionaires are the winners and the deciders that our wonderful free market system has given us.
/s
Noticing a trend. You had Amazon use sweatshop workers for their shopping by camera thing. You had that AI company that was just like 400 people in a sweatshop typing away. Now this.
I mean, there is actual “AI” tech that exists, and isn’t just people working in sweatshops, like this: https://deeplabcut.github.io/DeepLabCut/README.html
It’s just kind of difficult to get consistency between trials, and reliability seems to boil down to completely eliminating variability. So kind of useless outside of a lab setting (as is).
I tend to feel like it’s more trouble than it’s worth and too unreliable (as is) to usually bother with it, but I know people who are just fellow lab rats (not broligarchs) and are super devoted to getting AI to work for their projects. Like most sectors in this country, even science is being forced to embrace AI. Regardless of if it actually makes sense for your line of work or not, the expectation is get it working or face the chopping block, and there are definitely people who are trying their hardest to really get this shit off the ground (because the alternative is be prepared to be out of a job for being obsolete).
This is also why it’s kind of surprising to learn that even “AI” that’s simply comparing license plates from one camera to the next, is actually just due to human slave labor.
So, do any of the broligarchs receiving these huge contracts actually believe that eventually they’ll get AI to work once enough data and money is dumped into it and the little people at the bottom figure out all the kinks for them?
Or is it just that everybody at the top acknowledges this is a dead end, but once you’re in the secret club at the top of the food chain, and you’re making ridiculous amounts of money, your incentive is just to keep your mouth shut, keep making money, and fuck the consequences because once society collapses you’ll get to be kings of your own little monarchs anyway?
If it is the second, and nobody at the top really believes AI is going anywhere, then what are all the giant, energy sucking data centers that are being built across the country actually for?
You thing too big. IA is already used and work well in tool like n8n. Where you use it to write 3-5 lines of code to fill a function box. Still have to think to coordinates actions but the coding is mostly done by IA.
But if the broligarchs don’t actually expect to ever get any of this “AI” shit actually working, then what is the end game?
Obviously the majority of people are only in it to make quick money, but what about the psychos at the very top who are directing policy and building these giant nuclear powered “AI” data centers?
If Thiel/Musk/Zuckerberg don’t actually have the expectation that “AI” will eventually work itself out, then it won’t matter how money the rich (but not broligarch rich) Wall Street bros and bankers dumped into the “AI” boom.
It won’t be like the .com boom and the Internet, because it doesn’t actually exist. If the economy completely collapses, and dollar becomes worthless currency, the “money” the average rich asshole hoards away after investing in the 2025 “AI” boom, will have about as much value as monopoly money.
Meanwhile the fucking Bond villain billionaires like Thiel (who have been dreaming of this exact scenario for over 20 years) hold all resources (including a recently purchased uranium mine).
So, “hypothetically,” if that was Thiel’s endgame, and the “AI” jig is up, then they no longer have to pretend they’re trying to develop artificial intelligence or AGI. But they do already hold control of most resources, have mass surveillance capabilities, and each broligarch owns one or more of these giant supercomputers/data centers that have been built in cities all over the
U.S.world and soon in outer space.In this totally fictional scenario, once the dollar collapses (likely followed by all of society collapsing along with it), what do the broligarchs actually use their giant nuclear powered “AI” data centers for?
AI or no AI, they’re currently being built, so what is their actual purpose?
That close to the world of the série alien ! Yeah I love this série. But yeah I expect world to turn this way without the aliens maybe.
It allow not too dumb middle managers to develop more than they would have without but it is too expensive for what it output I join you on this. Buy the thing is still mind blowing, by doing statistics really fast you output something which is relatively close to human. At least far more than what humanity built before, but hey we only got one planet… Maybe exporting all this shit in space or on mar like they wanted. But that optimostic
The people working in the sweat shops are generating training data for the AI, not producing results and calling them AI generated.
AI = actually Indians
Looks like fraud will be on the rise as AI tech’s just not worth the investment but pretending to use it still reaps in the investments.
Tesla Optimus - Exposed Teleoperator
AI’s regressed to pre-Deep Blue now
Alright I’m gonna take a gamble and say that it looks like the AI bubble collapse is basically here.
But it’s especially infuriating that this company has received so many government contracts from ICE and all over the U.S., and in some cases literally just gone into towns and put cameras up without permission. Then refused to get around to taking them down in some cases, so towns just started covering them up with trash bags.
Its like an entire business model where some creepers with a cardboard box pretend lemonade stand just decided one day to start selling pretend AI instead. And we just let them? Who fucking signed off on this?
Who is it that even helped them get their foot in the door in the first place? Who was the coked out billionaire who apparently just fucking picked their name from a list he glanced at for 5 minutes on his way to rehab? Somebody needs to find that person, and we all need to be allowed to give him a swift public kick in the ass.
Hold on my dude,
I never said I’m for this surveilance bullshit.Fuck AI and Fuck ICE.
At the same time please take the time to read and interpret comments properly as you’re directing your justified rage at the wrong person.
Wait, what? I was just making a joke.
Unless you are the coked out billionaire? In that case I would like to know what you were thinking when you vouched for these people.
I was just pointing out it’s definitely going to contribute to the bubble popping, but it’s even worse than other AI companies bc it was mainly government contracts (which means they’ll probably still be getting funded for the foreseeable future even while other companies go under).
It’s insane they were ever allowed to receive a government contract for tech that didn’t even exist, so I would just really like to know how that happened? Like legally how could this have happened if not for somebody in some position of power helping these people get their foot in the door.
it looks like the AI bubble collapse is basically here.
FINALLY.
AI doesn’t exist, it’s just a bunch of dudes in India.
AI = Actually Indians
Haha, I love that!
It’s dudes in the Philippines this time, actually.
The whole world knows already that Us companies are doing such sh*t all the time.
But it never ceases to surprise me how Us americans themselves suddenly cry “scandal” as if they hadn’t known already that their companies are doing such sh*t all the time.
I mean there are legit companies doing good work that get passed over all the time.
How did these 3 guys get hundreds of millions in government contracts for a product that didn’t even exist.
And not only did it not exist, they were demanding everybody let them violate their privacy so that their non-existent product could “end crime.”
I’ll just come out and say it, the “scandal” imo isn’t the company was a fraud part. The scandal is that people within the government wanted so badly to amp up surveillance and the police state within the U.S. they just went ahead and dumped all this money into A.I. that didn’t actually exist because “A.I. is already here and it will fix everything, and even if you don’t want it, too fucking bad.”
Like it was never that the government thought A.I. tech was that important, or the future, or whatever bullshit. They’ve just realized the tech industry allows them the ability to spy on people, control information, and make a shit ton of money doing it.
It’s not fraud if you have political connections.
Yeah, the only surprise any more is whether it’s just going to be the usual fraud, or some new creative type of scam I haven’t seen yet.
The term “AI” has been misused and misrepresented so much that it’s more of an aesthetic than a technology now.
It sounds like you’re interpreting this as Flock using people to generate data that’s passed off to customers as being AI generated.
That’s not what’s happening. They’re using people to generate data to train the AI model.
It doesn’t make it better because they’re still using slave labor, but it’s different than them passing off the work of humans as AI.
🌏👨🚀🔫👨🚀 (currently since 2023)
The main thing flock is really supposed to do is capture and match pictures of license plates at different locations. It’s not even complex.
So how tf did they get the green light for the first government contract if they never even had that capability?
Venture trust or something.
Yeah I don’t understand how a private company deploying cameras on the side of roads is even legal.
Does that mean I can build solar powered raspberry pi units with cameras that do the same thing and pepper them around the country without question?
Thus has been the norm for years. Those red light and speed cameras in your town are also owned by private companies and it happens because these leaders are the type of people who go to Bing and type in “google” or who print their emails out only to scan them back into their computer in order to “save them” and these slimy company salespeople saw them coming from a mile away.
It means you should definitely try! And make a documentary.
Either they conned the government org in charge of purchasing it, or that org just didn’t care enough to look deeper. They got a professional-looking demo that made it look like the tech worked, and signed the contract without a second thought.
The history of the organization seems very odd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safety
It began as a side project in which the three co-founders built their first video surveillance cameras by hand around Langley’s dining room table. When a DeKalb County detective told Langley that his camera product had helped with solving a home break-in, Langley called the two other co-founders and told them to quit their jobs.
What?? How did a detective use it to solve a crime? Who was he? And based off of this one dude you all 3 just quit your jobs??? What??
Then we just jump ahead to 2022 and these cameras that didn’t even work had raised over $380 million in venture funding?
Then by the next year they were being used to sub for actual police due to a shortage of police officers?
So they just go from the Hardy Boys help solve a mystery in Georgia in 2017 and then suddenly by 2023 Marc Andreesen (big surprise) is suddenly funnelling millions into their business.
Oh, good, this citation will probably help make clear what the fuck actually happened between 2017 and 2023: Flock Safety. “Media Kit: Our Founding Story”. Flock Safety. Retrieved April 8, 2022.
It began as a side project in which the three co-founders built their first video surveillance cameras by hand around Langley’s dining room table. When a DeKalb County detective told Langley that his camera product had helped with solving a home break-in, Langley called the two other co-founders and told them to quit their jobs.
That reads exactly like those made up masturbatory LinkedIn anecdotes. I guarantee that this “Langley” guy is the one that edited the page to put it there.
Truly fucked up !
I have to give the broligarchs credit for always somehow managing to leave me stunned. Every time I learn some unbelievable bullshit like this, it’s like falling in hate all over again.
As we leave the stagnation of society behind in the ruins of regulations and democracy that only held us back, and the technocratic elite steer us full speed ahead through this “Renaissance” we are truly blessed to be forced to live through, the line between technology and magic continues to blur…
Or maybe it’s just 700 sweatshop workers in a trenchcoat. Who’s to say?
The ouroboros vibes are strong with these companies
It’s not legal where I live, but that didn’t stop me from fighting back.
I’m not down with this surveillance state we’re moving into.
Many states have made these illegal. I got pulled over for one of these in my blue state almost two decades ago.
Surprise surprise. 🙄
