Brilliant piece. The MTurk grinding really captured how invisible labor just erodes people from the inside out, turning every interaction into somthing transactional. I've done a bit of gig work myself and that feeling of optimizing your own humanity away, clicking till your finger goes numb, feels distubingly familiar. What got me most was the irony that both Jared and Anya are stuck performing emotional labor for pennies, except one's a person and the other's code pretending connection is real.
Thanks. The chapter title is a hat-tip to Gray and Suri's non-fiction book "Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass"
You're right that engagement-focussed AI girlfriends are a form of transactional intimacy - like digital Thai bar girls will never complain or seek to leave the coercive control of bar owners.
A further irony is that the HIT tasks Jared is doing for pennies on MTurk is for data-labelling companies that supply the training corpus to the very LLM building companies that are then exploiting his emotional vulnerability and loneliness. A dark Ouroboros.
And the chapter end song and it's lyrics: "Come Lie Next To Me" - who is lying to who?
Brilliant piece. The MTurk grinding really captured how invisible labor just erodes people from the inside out, turning every interaction into somthing transactional. I've done a bit of gig work myself and that feeling of optimizing your own humanity away, clicking till your finger goes numb, feels distubingly familiar. What got me most was the irony that both Jared and Anya are stuck performing emotional labor for pennies, except one's a person and the other's code pretending connection is real.
Thanks. The chapter title is a hat-tip to Gray and Suri's non-fiction book "Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass"
https://www.amazon.com.au/Ghost-Work-Silicon-Building-Underclass/dp/1328566242
You're right that engagement-focussed AI girlfriends are a form of transactional intimacy - like digital Thai bar girls will never complain or seek to leave the coercive control of bar owners.
A further irony is that the HIT tasks Jared is doing for pennies on MTurk is for data-labelling companies that supply the training corpus to the very LLM building companies that are then exploiting his emotional vulnerability and loneliness. A dark Ouroboros.
And the chapter end song and it's lyrics: "Come Lie Next To Me" - who is lying to who?