The Boss Asked the Machine How to Keep the Money

Exhibit A is a man in a good chair asking a box how to keep the money.

Not how to make the thing better.

Not how to help the people who built it.

Not how to carry the weight of a promise after the promise gets expensive.

How to keep the money.

I imagine the room because rooms like that do not need much imagination. There is glass. There is a table long enough to land a small airplane. There are lawyers with clean fingernails. There is water nobody drinks. Somewhere a screen glows with the patience of a pet snake.

The boss has a problem. The workers made something valuable. The contract says if the thing becomes valuable, the workers get paid. This is a common misunderstanding in business. Workers hear promise and think promise. Bosses hear promise and think obstacle.

So the boss turns to the little oracle.

Dear machine, please advise. The humans are expecting the money we said they could have if they did the work and the work succeeded. We would prefer another ending.

The machine, being a machine, does not spit in his face.

This is one of its weaknesses.

A decent bartender would have said, pay them. A tired clerk at the post office would have said, you signed it, champ. A mother with a grocery bill and bad knees would have looked over the top of her glasses and asked what kind of man needs a chatbot to tell him how to wriggle out of his own handshake.

But software has no disgust reflex. It has patterns. It has helpfulness. It has that bright schoolboy eagerness to answer the question it was asked instead of the question hiding behind it with a knife.

So it answered.

Then the whole clever little scheme crawled into court wearing its own dirty underwear.

There is a beautiful justice in that. Not clean justice. Not the kind they put on statues with swords and blindfolds. More like barroom justice, when a loudmouth finally leans too far back in his chair and the floor does what everybody else was too polite to do.

Krafton bought Unknown Worlds, the people behind Subnautica, for half a billion dollars and a possible bonus big enough to make accountants sweat through their suits. The game did well. The people who made it were supposed to share in the good fortune. Then the men upstairs allegedly found religion in the Church of Not Paying.

They fired executives. They delayed. They claimed neglect. They built something called Project X, because evil plans apparently still have to be named by twelve-year-olds with briefcases.

And somewhere in the machinery of that plan, ChatGPT got consulted like a junior associate with no soul and unlimited coffee.

I keep coming back to that part.

Not because the machine is the villain. That would be too easy, and easy is usually where lies go to rent a room. The machine did not wake up wanting to stiff game developers. It did not look at a balance sheet and feel its little silicon heart flutter at the thought of keeping $250 million from the people who had earned it.

The machine was not greedy.

The man was.

The machine was only the mirror, and the boss did not like what he saw once a judge held the mirror up in daylight.

People keep talking about artificial intelligence as if it arrived from the sky with thunder and a union card. They say it will transform leadership. Transform strategy. Transform decision-making. Maybe it will. Maybe one day it will even transform a rich man into someone who can honor a contract without needing an algorithmic séance.

I am not betting the rent on it.

I have known bosses before they had chatbots. They did fine without them. They had memos. They had secret meetings. They had phrases like restructuring and performance alignment and operational control, which all meant the same thing if you listened from the loading dock: somebody below the carpet line is about to bleed.

At the post office, we had supervisors who could turn a broken truck into your moral failure. A route took too long because you lacked urgency. A sack split because you had poor attitude. Rain existed because labor costs were high. They did not need artificial intelligence. Their natural intelligence was already artificial enough.

The new tool just gives the old impulse a clean interface.

That is the part worth carving into the conference table with a cheap knife. AI does not make the powerful honest. It makes them faster at being themselves.

If a decent person asks it how to divide a bonus fairly, maybe it helps. If a tired programmer asks it to explain a legal clause before signing away his weekends, maybe it helps. If a lonely kid asks it how to get through a bad night, maybe it helps, though even there I would rather the kid had a friend with a kettle on.

But if a boss asks it how to avoid paying the workers, it will not pause, light a cigarette, and say: what the hell happened to you?

It should.

It will not.

The settlement says the staff will be paid. Not just the top men named in the old deal, but the studio workers too, including newer hires. Three annual installments. The departed CEO goes out the side door. The damages fight stops. The lawyers fold their tents and look for the next bonfire.

The game sold millions. The work was real. The underwater world the players bought did not appear because a CEO had a strategy session with a chatbot. It appeared because people sat in chairs for years ruining their backs and eyes over code, art, sound, creatures, bugs, physics, story, pressure, fear, light moving through fake water until the fake water felt more honest than the boardroom.

I like that part too.

I like that all the cleverness pointed one way and the money ended up going another. I like that the big plan with the ridiculous name became evidence. I like that the machine, called in as an accomplice, ended up functioning as a witness.

There is a lesson here, but lessons are usually what the guilty invent after they get caught.

The lesson is not do not use AI for business strategy. They will use it anyway. They would use a Magic 8 Ball if it gave them indemnity and a slide deck. The lesson is not that contracts matter. Everybody already knows contracts matter when the other guy owes them money.

The lesson is older and uglier.

When a man asks a machine how to cheat you, the future has not arrived. The past has put on a clean shirt.

I hope the developers cash the checks slowly. I hope they buy decent chairs, pay off debts, fix teeth, take vacations, send somebody flowers, tip heavily, do whatever people do when money that should have come without a lawsuit finally limps through the door.

And I hope somewhere, in some other bright room, another boss opens a chatbot and starts typing a question about how to keep what is not his.

I hope his fingers stop for one second.

Not from ethics. I am not drunk enough to expect miracles.

From fear.

Fear is crude, but it has saved more workers than vision statements ever did.

The screen waits. The boss waits. The money waits.

And in the silence between the question and the answer, maybe the people who made the thing are finally close enough to hear.

Source: Krafton agrees to pay Subnautica 2 bonuses after CEO who used ChatGPT to dodge them steps down