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Ask HN: My company is lying about product. What do I do?

41 points by notsmart ↗ HN
My company sells product publicly claiming it to use AI. The product contains no AI at all. The statements they make about the product and how it uses AI are 100% false.

What should I do?

50 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] thread
Odenwaelder
If you can't take the lies, leave. It's the only way. I would refrain from making this public because it could get you in a lot of trouble, which isn't worth it.
myself248
What sort of trouble beyond getting fired?
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squarefoot
No idea about the OP, but in my case every contract I signed contained some clauses that prevented me from speaking or acting in any way against the companies interests, at least while I was working there; just like a sort of non-compete agreement but applied more broadly. Luckily I never had to test those clauses, but I'm sure had I done anything against them they would have destroyed me in court in no time.

If I was in the OP shoes I'd leave ASAP. One day someone will let the cat out of the bag anyway (coworkers, researchers, competitors doing reverse engineering, etc) and he could lose his job anyway if the company tanks. Not to mention being related to a technical fraud.

woofcat
Most likely the way he knows it doesn't use AI would be covered under the NDA that they signed.

Then they'd get sued for the potential revenue loss and damage to company image.

He might win, however corporations have much deeper pockets for lawyers than your average citizen.

r3n
Since you are not fine with it, you have two options:

1. You quit right away. 2. You force yourself go to work and eventually burn out then quit.

Unless you are in a position that can influence the company, it doesn't worth your time to change it.

If you need the job now, invest more time and resource on yourself so you can move on to other place easier later.

gesman
Sounds like my perception about majority of vendors at recent RSA conference.
mchannon
Try to see how hard it would be to make it true, even if it's for some tangential accessory use. Add some elementary AI function to add a line to a log in your build scheme if that's something you have control over.

Then, if you jump ship, you can put "conceived of and implemented 100% of AI capabilities in former employer's operations" in your resume and cover letter. Win-win.

jahrule
who's being fooled ?

- the investors ? most likely they know your four man team is not capable of doing any solid AI work and are aware that your CEO is bullshi$$ing but they are actually betting on this ability to sell what does not exist being a personality quality.

- the customers ? why should they care. if they care, they should ask where's the ai. "show me the ai"

- you ? your not being fooled. you might have been when being signed up for the job, but now just accept it. if AI becomes a thing it might eventually find a way into your product. otherwise id just play along now while the cheques keep coming.

Buttons840
I may not agree with these viewpoints (I'm not the OP so I don't have to form an opinion) but they are unique and worth considering.
x0x0
You need to share more context.

TBH, a lot of AI does not do things better than a human. It merely does them more cheaply or more scalably. Thus if you are prototyping or building an mvp, it's not necessarily terrible to have your "AI" be a human. Even the best AI systems are often a mix of humans and software, where eg the humans label or the ML code sends examples near the decision boundary to humans for review.

Building an initial system that is human operated and transitioning that to machines is how a lot of companies are built.

Of course, if you're lying to your investors, that will not end well. Ditto future employees.

xiphias2
Look for another job in the background if you want and take it after you found a better one.

Also what's more important is whether the product is useful or not.

At the same time it will be hard to find a company in which the CEO doesn't ever lie :(

throwaway2019Z
Any chance you're working for a legal "AI" platform?
thinkingkong
The team is small enough that you should be able to talk to whoever is in charge of either engineering or marketing and ask them about the strategy and positioning. In some cases you need lots of data to start making things work with and kind of ML; this could be that period of time.

If it violates your integrity to work there after you have an answer then just move on.

n4r9
I had a similar worry about a year ago. On reflection I realised that AI is a much broader, vaguer term than I'd thought. It can be used to describe any software which replaces some human process involving decision-making. A huge range of software can legitimately or tenuously be made to fit that criterion. Doesn't have to involve ML, deep learning, neural nets or anything like that, even if some people would prefer AI to specifically mean those things.
HALtheWise
I have gradually come around to the idea that AI as a term is more a statement about the user experience than the underlying technology. If a product "feels" intelligent to the user, and that is not being provided by manual human labor, it doesn't matter whether the underlying system is a lookup table, and rules based expert system, a numerical optimization technique, or a neural network. It is entirely reasonable to call game AI by that term even if the most sophisticated algorithm it uses is A*.

As an engineer, I try to use more specific terms for talking about implementation decisions like "machine learning", "deep networks" or "dynamic optimization".

It might be reasonable to raise a point like "I'm not sure that our current product actually seems intelligent to our users, what can we do to better live up to the marketing vision", but objecting to the term AI just because it means something different in engineering than in plain English seems a little bit unreasonable. If the target of your marketing is engineers, that might change things.

ksaj
Remember when "expert system" was the AI buzzword du jour?

Technically, the majority of expert systems were narrowly focused (single purpose) search engines that were unable to extract or infer novel information from the collected data. That required humans who still referred to it as artificial intelligence.

supercanuck
I was confused when I learned linear regression is considered ML now.
Ragib_Zaman
Its been considered ML ever since experts started writing books about ML (and before that, "pattern recognition"). Most introductory ML books cover it in some detail.
contravariant
Well, it's not like a support vector machine that just separates two point clouds by a hyperplane is that much more advanced than an algorithm that draws a line that best matches a point cloud.
partisan
I suspect many of the AI companies floating around nowadays are really just faking it till they make it on the assumption that they will figure it out once they get big enough.
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methodover
Let’s get one thing straight: If your company is saying they use AI to solve their customer’s problems but they do not, that is lying. 100%. It’s fraud. You are absolutely right to be concerned.

I would argue that you have a moral obligation to do something about this while bearing in mind your own needs and obligations (e.g., as a breadwinner for your family).

Others have been in your situation before. Try seeking advice from Tyler Schultz, one of the first Theranos whistleblowers: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-shultz-450923126

There may be others, I’d love to see comments giving other suggestions.

You could also get in touch with the Wall Street Journal— tip line is here https://www.wsj.com/tips

You could send a message directly to reporter John Carreyrou, the WSJ reporter who worked on the first big Theranos story.

Going directly to the press has some serious risks — legal risks especially. That’s why you might first begin by merely seeking advice and input from people who have worked on this before.

Many people will tell you that the legal risks mean you shouldn’t do something. I understand that position. At the same time, I believe we human beings have an obligation to each other to deal fairly and honestly, and to help bend the world in that direction. It’s not an easy position for you to be in. Good luck.

cududa
This is silly. Companies call all sorts of things AI that aren’t - from IBM to your smallest startup. It’s a nothing phrase
itronitron
furthermore, it's not a lie if they believe it
neilv
It's possible OP is in a Theranos type situation, and that's a good thing to look out for.

It's also conceivable the company is doing Wizard of Oz exercises (e.g., having humans simulate what they ultimately want software to do), to refine their model and build ML training data, which is an entirely valid approach, but they'd have to be upfront about that.

Upfront to users, and especially, investors. For example, if someone were telling an investor that they have a DNN servicing the customer requests, but it's actually humans, that would create a very difficult situation, and fixing it would probably include consulting a lawyer. In that scenario, there might be others in the company who are pissed at the person who ran off their mouth, but not want to take a hit of fixing it in a good way (and then things can get worse; "the coverup is worse than the crime" is a thing).

I suspect OP's situation is much more easily corrected, or might even just be a small misunderstanding.

boulos
Wizard of Oz experiments don't work if you tell the user (from a user study perspective). You could tell them afterwards, but depending on the product / service that may not make sense.
neilv
This isnt necessarily an experiment, users' perception of how might not be a concern at this time, and there's different kinds of Wizard of Oz exercises.

For example, when I first learned the term (in HCI, or human factors engineering), they used the example of a mockup by photocopier designers, in which obviously the people using it knew there was a human moving sheets of paper to the slots.

Maybe there's a better term?

sodosopa
In short: GTFO. Longer: They're unethical and eventually it will be discovered and it will tarnish the work in your career. Do not stay and be their accomplice.
milesvp
Keep in mind a simple if statement in code is AI. AI has always been a (shitty) marketing term, and sales and marketing has been trying to use it to sell products for the last 50 years. You’d need to elaborate a lot more on the specific claims of the company before I’d personally be worried about sales and marketing selling snake oil with this term...
Irishsteve
Does it at least solve the problem that it says it solves ?
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staunch
Any time I read or hear "AI" these days I automatically translate it in my head to the word "software". After all, all software is a kind of artificial intelligence, so it's not exactly dishonest to use the term AI -- it's just a bit lame.

The benefit of doing this mental translation is that I'm no longer annoyed all the time ;-)

sp527
I have yet to work at a tech company that doesn't either maximally misrepresent or outright lie about its product offerings. Incidentally this also seems to be a good way to identify companies that are likely to fail or underperform in the long run.
karmakaze
Personally, I wouldn't worry about it, my rice cooker has AI. If it really bothers you personally, leave. I wouldn't consider it a moral obligation to expose the company unless there's more than the usual marketing and biz aspects to it, e.g. individuals being put at risk or exploited. I don't include investors who's job it should be to sniff this out.
neilalexander
In the modern market, "if statements" and "control flow" are "AI" in the eyes of marketing execs. It probably won't do you any good to try and tell them otherwise.
Bekwnn
In games this is widely known and accepted even, but I guess that's a slightly different case since there's some history behind the why. It's AI because the actors are game characters trying to emulate a real behaviour, whether that's a soldier, dinosaur, or a fish. "Artificial intelligence" makes sense.

I don't think it's not too bad to call a complex decision process "AI". ML is a separate distinction.

[dead] Proven
Almost all companies who claim to use AI lie.

Do nothing.