The gig workers were hired to pass liveness checks on video or to follow social media accounts. They didn’t even write their own comments. Instead, they responded to messages by selecting from three pregenerated replies. But they could prove they’re human, whereas the AI personas could only demur with a plausible explanation for why a video chat or call was not possible. “Backend components fabricated likes, visitors, and pre-recorded ‘video’ when no real person was available, and tracked which users had begun to suspect they were talking to a bot,” Anthropic’s report states. Because of the smattering of interactions with real people, some users began to believe that the entirely AI-generated replies they were receiving on the app were also from real people.
