In 2016 Amazon unveiled its seemingly impressive gambit exhibiting the wondrous potential of artificial intelligence. With its Just Walk Out programme, visitors to Amazon Fresh supermarkets wouldn’t need cashiers at all. AI would do all the work and Amazon would automatically charge shoppers for the contents of their basket. 

There was, according to reports, a small catch: Amazon was additionally employing low-paid Indian workers to verify each customer’s receipts, viewing video remotely. This was certainly ‘artificial’ but hardly the artificial intelligence dream – more like outsourcing with extra bells and whistles. 

This Wizard of Ozzian parlour trick has reignited conversations around ‘AI-washing’, where businesses tout their machine-learning credentials while the real work is performed by real people behind the proverbial curtain.

Put simply, AI-washing could be anything from exaggerating the abilities of an organisation’s deep-learning models to simply making everything up. For its part, Amazon said the outcry was due to a “misconception” that Just Walk Out relies on human reviewers watching shoppers live from India.