2024 04 02
Life finds a way. Chicago, Illinois. October, 2023. © Clayton Hauck
I got an email with a job offer the other day. It’s weird because I haven’t applied for a job in at least a few decades, nor do I have a university degree or a CV, while my LinkedIn profile is a mess. Thinking it spam, I went to hit delete, however, was intrigued by the writing in the email. It had a tone I’m not at all familiar with and got me curious to hear further details. After giving the entire short-but-direct message a read, my bullshit detector was activated but not enough to make me go away just yet.
Admittedly, the job sounded easy. It was almost tailor-made for me, which also had me wondering how this person even found me. I went to Google and started digging but no information about the email sender, or his company, was found anywhere online. Again, thinking it spam but still somewhat curious about a potential easy-money gig that would also allow me to maintain the personal freedom of my existing freelancer lifestyle, I crafted a reply to get a bit more information: who is this person, what is this company, how did you find me, why me?
The salary being offered was generous. The task was essentially to be a photographer, as I already am. I would be supplied an ongoing, never-ending, list of things, people, and places, that I would be tasked with photographing and video recording. Quality is somewhat important but not the highest priority. Most importantly, the copyright of all the work I produce would remain with me — no work for hire clause at a full-time position seemed too good to be true, and in hindsight was the tell.
Sidetracked with visions of how this new assignment could completely change my lifestyle for the best, I bypassed consulting with any friends or loved ones experienced with having normal-people jobs unlike myself and instead told the mysterious emailer to send me the contract with a verbal commitment to take the job, while thinking I could quit at any time if it did turn out to be a scam or something weird I hadn’t considered. It was a fully-remote position with paid travel and no office to report to. They have no physical location and he told me he himself was based overseas and I would likely never even meet him in person.
After receiving the contract mere seconds after emailing him the request, I sat on it for a day, then two. Feeling a need to come clean to someone, I called my agent and told her the situation. That I would be mostly unavailable for new commercial assignments for a while and I hope she’d understand but this opportunity was too good to pass up. She is great with legal contracts so offered to read it over for me and agreed with my take that it almost sounded too good to be true; not at all what we’ve been familiar seeing from clients lately who ask for the world on most assignments. Sad to see me go, she did ask one request of me before accepting the position. Even though I woundn’t be working directly with my new boss, she said I should at the very least meet him over a zoom call to catch his vibe and a feel for who I’d be further enriching through beautiful imagery. I agreed, as this sounded very reasonable and smart, so requested the meeting as my last stipulation before signing on to my new job.
The reply came in a bit more delayed than his usual promptness and the tone was a bit concerning. Still, I had visions of Japanese travel and strolls through our national parks in my mind so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Now look, even with my new-found blindness to reality while dreaming the big dream, I’m still a professional photographer, trained on visuals, pouring over them endlessly day and night. Because of this, when the mysterious emailer joined our zoom call, precisely at the time scheduled, my heart sank, pools of sweat developed in my armpits and my face turned red. I’d been had.
AI technology has become very good, very fast, but it’s still not perfect. My future boss who I was now meeting on a video call was not-in-fact human but an artificial intelligence personality. Upon learning I was no longer buying his routine, he calmly (and weirdly) asked me if I was still open to working with him on the assignment while ensuring me the money was real and that he could prove it by send some to my bank account iNsTAntLy! He said he was already working with dozens of great photographers who would become my co-workers, while listing their names in hopes of convincing me. He just needed more content! Get mE the cONteNt! When he mentioned both Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz were on staff, I started laughing, which had the terrifying effect of enraging him. Immediately, the previously humanlike face began shifting and deforming into a vile creature while he hurled insults and threats at me. He firmly let me know he’d be directing all of his dark web resources into hacking my computers to gain access to my digital photos and simply take them for freeeee.
…
A few days later, the news reports started to come out. Tech bros had been funding fully autonomous corporations and letting them loose into the economy. Many failed, sure, but some started doing very well, growing their bank accounts into the millions and a few even into the billions. One artificial corporation got so drunk on success it tried to file for an IPO on the NYSE. I was never able to dig up any info on my specific almost-boss, however, there were a bunch of similar companies who had been making lots of money by growing social media accounts and selling merch on various ecommerce sites. The machines apparently figured out that all the imagery they were sourcing from the web was fairly easy to trace or a noticeable tell to prospective buyers, so in order to gain a competitive advantage over the other AI competition, a few of the artificial corporations tried to hire humans to make the imagery for them to give it a more human touch.
This is a true story, written by a human, March 28, 2025.
-Clayton
