Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao

There were other rules. Submitting a task quickly was rewarded, but submitting a task too quickly triggered something in the system that meant a worker wouldn’t get paid for that task. The prevailing theory was that the platform associated exceptional speed with bot activity, which meant it discarded the answers. Sometimes the tasks that appeared also had few instructions and were impossible to decipher; other times the platform had bugs that didn’t load the tasks correctly. The Venezuelans in the group who were once software engineers created browser extensions to deal with these issues and shared them with their fellow Appen workers. One extension added an extra time delay to every task submission to avoid the apparent bot tax. Another automatically refreshed the Appen queue every second because the platform didn’t always update itself. A third sounded an alarm once a new task appeared so workers could step away from their computers to go to the bathroom or cook without fear of missing an opportunity.