The Zoom conference has about a thousand people in it, mostly in their fifties and sixties from what I can see. Having read the onboarding guidelines, I have little to gain from paying attention, so I start looking my fellow participants up on Facebook. A retired nurse in North Carolina. A working attorney in New Mexico. A disgraced art history instructor in New York. All of these people are gathered because they’ve been promised forty dollars an hour to teach robots to sound less robotic. For this host of unemployed, underemployed, and obsolete workers, it seems like a great gig. 

After onboarding, we all move over to the Slack, which quickly becomes saturated with near-elderly people asking no one in particular for tech support — these projects are often run by skeleton crews of software engineers who are scarcely on hand to explain how to switch Google accounts to access onboarding docs. Soon, the tasks are released, like buckets of chum dumped into a shark tank. We get to work. Each task takes roughly ten minutes to complete and involves reading a user prompt and then editing a chatbot’s generated response to be less slop-like. This entails correcting the text according to an extensive style guide with numerous rules about emoji usage, bulleted lists, length, tone, and specificity, while also applying gut reasoning about weird phrasing choices and sycophancy. The prompts are collected from actual chatbot users (e.g. “girl from work haveing baby shower dont rly know her pls write card want to be invited”). The A.I. responses are more grammatically correct but no less painful to read.

We’ve only just gotten started when a guy in the Slack notes that only around five thousand tasks have been released. With a thousand of us working, we’ll clearly exhaust it by the end of the day, he says, and what happens after that? A coordinator explains that the tasks will be sent to “the client,” and if this shadowy entity is pleased with our progress, it will release more. As expected, by early evening on day one, the tasks are all eaten up, and the project is temporarily suspended.

For the next few days, the Slack is abuzz with some people asking when more tasks will be available, some lamenting that they weren’t logged on and missed the feeding frenzy, and others still just trying to access the onboarding doc. Workers bide their time in the #general channel, sharing pictures of their cats and asking everyone about the last movie they saw in theaters.

A week passes. Then a month. The Slack posts gradually wane. Finally, an email arrives curtly notifying us that our project has been completed and thanking us for all our hard work. The Slack is immediately deactivated; our temporary family dispersed. The quickest of us have made about fifty dollars total, just enough to take a friend to see that fun new Ryan Gosling movie.