Is AI ‘manipulated by humans somewhere in India’? Professor Jiang makes new claim on podcast; here’s the truth

A podcast clip from the Jack Neel podcast featuring Chinese -Canadian academic, Jiang Xueqin, a.k.a. Professor Jiang has gone viral on social media after he claimed that artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT are not generating responses independently. He instead claimed that AI is “being manipulated by humans somewhere in India.”

A clip from Jack Neel podcast featuring a Chinese-Canadian academic, Jiang Xueqin has gone viral after he claimed ChatGPT responses are “being manipulated by humans somewhere in India.” (Youtube@Predictive History)The remarks, widely shared on X, prompted a wave of reactions as users questioned Jiang's claims. According to experts, the claim is misleading because it conflates human involvement in building AI systems with how they generate responses after deployment.

In the podcast clip shared by Jack Neel, Professor Jiang questioned, “Do you really think when you put something into ChatGPT, it’s going to be generated by the AI?"

Jiang then went on and claimed, “I guarantee you it’s not true. I guarantee you it’s being manipulated by humans somewhere in India.”

He went on to argue that a human initially writes responses before they are absorbed into AI models.

“When you asked ChatGPT, write me a paper on Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo. I think what happened was a human first wrote that, and then is inputted into the AI model, and then absorbed into the AI model,” Jiang said.

He also compared ChatGPT to supervised machine learning used in facial recognition systems, saying AI can never become fully independent because humans design the algorithms and their weights. “What people don't appreciate is humans are the ones who are designing these weights. The algorithm is trying to figure out what these weights should be. ChatGPT does the same bloody thing. Maybe it's 90% AI, 10% human, but it's still 10% human.”

Large language models such as ChatGPT generate text by predicting one token at a time using neural networks trained on massive datasets, according to TechRadar.

Once deployed, the model produces responses computationally without a hidden team of people and then write answers for each prompt.

Humans are nevertheless involved throughout the development process. For example, though ChatGPT analyzes the vast amounts of text grasp grammar, facts about the world and even some basic reasoning skills, the model is fine tuned on more specific datasets. According to TechRadar, this frequently entails human reviewers who offer input to assist mold the model's behavior and make its replies more suitable, helpful, and consistent with our expectations.

Following the viral clip, Grok responded that Professor Jiang’s statement was false. It said ChatGPT generates responses autonomously through next-token prediction after training. It said that humans contribute to training and reinforcement learning but don't help in live response generation.

MarketsPulse24H also noted under the video that AI companies employ human workers worldwide, including in India, for annotation, moderation, safety testing and evaluation. However, that work is different from manually generating each ChatGPT response.

Shirin Gupta is a content producer with the Hindustan Times. She covers everything between politics, entertainment and sports at the US desk. Shirin got interested in political journalism during her time as a web editor at her college newspaper NCC News in Syracuse when she first started seeing the effects of national politics in life of her fellow colleagues. Shirin has worked on a wide range of fast-moving and developing stories locally when she was at NCC editing accessible reports for the audience. Her current role requires her to track real-time updates, verify information and present balanced coverage across diverse beats. Covering US politics from an international newsroom perspective has further deepened her understanding of how domestic decisions can have far-reaching global consequences. With a keen interest in international affairs, Shirin continues to build her expertise in geopolitics, policy shifts, and cross-border developments. She aims to learn and evolve her reporting in matters of geopolitics and international issues. Outside the newsroom Shirin writes about books and music for her personal blog. She is an avid consumer of pop culture and reveres literature.Read More