A Predator's Farewell

The Sperm AI underbelly, creating God 2, the pit of lost souls, volcanic fish, corporate ladders, two-skulled babies, and a heinous discovery.

Some specifics (e.g., names) have been changed to protect identities and dance around any real or imagined nondisclosure agreements. Everything below is made up, invented, fictional — though it did all happen in real life almost exactly as described.

My chaotic journey through the multi-billion-dollar bowels of a corporate AI whale, henceforth referred to as “Sperm AI” after the cetacean identity of Moby Dick¹ and for no other reason, began with the predicament of having two empty pockets and ended with a terrible discovery of moral betrayal.

I was languishing on my sofa in the late hours of the night, fretting over money and spiraling down the accursed shafts of the formerly bird-associated shitposting app. My feverish scrolling became so rapid that I was no longer reading the words that flew up my screen, attempting instead to register entire cohorts of information in single mental snapshots, drowning my subconscious in bilge and trusting that it would slap me awake if anything of value surfaced.

My finger stopped and my eyes refocused. A post about making easy remote money by typing words. Yes; this was interesting to me, this was good stuff, a potential lifeline. You could apparently get paid to type words about any number of things: History, Data Science, Computer Science, Finance, Economics, Creative Writing, Poetry, Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Nutrition, Sports, &c. These words would be used to tune Large Language Models. All you had to do was apply, pass some basic assessments, and get to it.

I had essentially no prior work experience and no demonstrable skills that were of any value to The Marketplace, but I knew that I could learn about things and type words better than most people. I was already an enthusiastic user of then-novel ChatGPT, and I understood the early incentives behind funding Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). These factors, along with the credibility of Sperm AI (a unicorn on its way to decacorn status), gave me relative confidence that I wasn’t walking into an elaborate phishing scam. I applied then and there.

Less than a week later, I was asked to complete a number of training tasks and basic assessments. I had selected the Poetry and Creative Writing domains as my areas of expertise on account of my aforementioned lack of demonstrable skills and associated credentials. I stumbled through a few questions on haiku &c. and was soon deemed competent enough to start training one of the still-primary competitors in the ongoing race to construct God 2.² I received a link to join the appropriate Slack workspace.

Clicking this link launched me into a channel of unmitigated chaos populated by thousands of lost souls clamoring for direction. We had all been tossed into a giant digital holding pit, a seventy-foot-deep crater encircled by sheer cliff face, each unplaced worker a naked baby bird with outstretched neck blindly opening and closing its beaked maw. Messages constantly flooded the channel: some polite, some conniptive or Karen-y, some in broken or near-incoherent English, many with the telltale “Hello sir,” or “Please, sir kindly” openings.³