The long read: For one weird year, I was the human who stepped in to make sure a property chatbot didn’t blow its cover – I was a person pretending to be a computer pretending to be a person
For one weird year, I was the human who stepped in to make sure a property chatbot didn’t blow its cover – I was a person pretending to be a computer pretending to be a personhe recruiter was a chipper woman with a master’s degree in English. Previously she had worked as an independent bookseller. “Your experience as an English grad student is ideal for this role,” she told me. The position was at a company that made artificial intelligence for real estate.
I was one of about 60 operators. Most of us were poets and writers with MFAs, but there were also PhDs in performance studies and comparative literature, as well as a number of opera singers, another demographic evidently well suited for chatbot impersonation – or, I suppose, for impersonating a chatbot that’s impersonating a person.
If you tried to call Brenda back, she wouldn’t pick up. Instead, she would text a succession of excuses for why she was unable to come to the phone, each one mistier than the last. “I am unable to make calls on this line,” she would say. “But I am available via text.” On the third attempt, she would respond with a curt “Sorry I missed your call”, a phrase she would thenceforth recite unyieldingly, no matter how many times you redialed.
My recruiter had assured me that my sophisticated language skills qualified me for the position. In reality, the job was little more than a game of reflexes. The moment I logged on to the command station, messages stacked up in real time. Each message made a ping when it hit the inbox, a ping I soon learned was impossible to mute, and often the messages arrived in such quick succession that the pings stuttered and ricocheted off one another.
Many of the properties that used Brenda were similar in a way that unnerved me: blocky, polychrome behemoths located near transit hubs and composed entirely of glass and vinyl siding, their facades as flat as iPhone screens. There was something heedless about these constructions. They didn’t seem aware of what cities they were in.
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