Use Your Judgment. Not That Part.

I drag a second chair up to the kitchen table and try to imagine giving somebody a job without letting him find out what I am hiring him to become.

The interview is invented. So is the applicant. I am playing the supervisor because I have spent enough time congratulating myself on not being one. For once I want the clean side of the table, the side where a man’s difficulties can be written down as problems with the man.

“You’ll be evaluating pictures,” I tell him.

He asks what qualifications he needs.

“Judgment.”

This pleases him. It pleases me too. I have managed to make looking at a screen sound like an acknowledgment of his existence. He has lived, noticed things, made distinctions. Somewhere in that expensive head there ought to be something I can buy by the hour.

“What kind of pictures?”

“Pictures made or changed by a machine. Someone asks for a change. You decide whether the machine did what was asked.”

“And if it shouldn’t have?”

I straighten a sheet of paper. There is nothing on it yet, but the gesture buys me a moment. I have seen men get through entire meetings on the authority of a straightened sheet of paper.

“That isn’t the question.”

He hasn’t even started and already he is having trouble following instructions.

The real work behind my little rehearsal is being done by human contractors reviewing Microsoft’s Copilot image-editing prompts and uploaded photos. Reporting by 404 Media, described in Futurism, says workers have encountered sexual requests involving identifiable people and material they found disturbing. Their assigned task was to judge how successfully the images fulfilled the requests, rather than judge the requests’ ethics.

Documents described in the reporting told them to use their “intuition.”

I like how much can be asked of that word. Bring the years of seeing people, the private associations, the feeling that something isn’t right. Bring all of it to work. Then use only the portion that tells us whether the machine followed orders.

My applicant wants to know what he should do if a face belongs to somebody who never agreed to the picture.

“I haven’t given you enough information to establish consent,” I say.

“So I can’t call it all right.”

“I didn’t ask you to call it all right. I asked you to call it accurate.”

Now I am getting the hang of management. Every time he makes the job larger, I make his answer smaller.

I haven’t seen these workers’ contracts or all their safety rules. The reporting includes workers asking for material to be flagged as unsafe. That narrow grading question doesn’t prove nobody can raise an alarm.

But I can see the split in the assignment itself. A person is being asked to recognize something and then answer a question that leaves part of the recognition out. That doesn’t require a secret plot. It requires a well-defined task.

The applicant pushes his chair back a little.

“Could a machine do this?”

“Not well enough. That’s why I need you.”

“Then why does it matter so little what I think?”

I was hoping to discuss his availability.

I have heard enough talk about keeping a human involved to find the idea comforting. A person will be there. Someone will catch the ugly thing, notice the part that doesn’t fit, understand what the machine missed. In my mind I give this person a chair and some authority. The actual arrangement may include only the chair.

My imaginary employee has not failed to notice anything. He has noticed too much for the answer I require. If I replace him with somebody who performs the same recognition silently, I can keep the human judgment and lose the human objection. I can even call the replacement better at the job.

I don’t need him to become cruel. Cruelty might interfere with careful work. I need him to keep seeing the person in the picture while learning that the person is not the subject of the question.

“Will I be warned before the bad material comes up?” he asks.

Here the real reporting interrupts me again. Workers complained about encountering disturbing material without warning. One described recoiling from content promoting anorexia. I don’t need to reproduce the rest of the inventory. The people who had to look at it have already done enough looking for this paragraph.

I cannot give my applicant a truthful answer about the company’s current arrangements. So I tell him what my imaginary operation ought to provide: warnings, a way to refuse disturbing tasks, somebody who can act on a safety report. Paid time for that work instead of pretending it occurs outside the job.

“Good,” he says. “Then my objection counts as work.”

I look at the blank paper again.

Because there is the part I have been avoiding. If noticing harm counts as work, I have to make room for what happens after it is noticed. I cannot promise him respect and budget only for completed ratings. A warning may interrupt the flow of pictures. An investigation may take longer than evaluating another batch. The troublesome man may be performing the most useful part of the job while appearing to finish nothing.

I would like to hire his intuition without inheriting its interruptions. He would like to remain the same person from one sentence of his job description to the next.

“Do you still want the position?” I ask.

“I haven’t heard what it pays.”

Of course. I nearly forgot to put money in my argument about labor. A man can understand the arrangement perfectly and still need the work. Knowing what the job is doing to him doesn’t pay him to leave it.

I have no wage from the reporting to offer him. No invented family waiting at home, either. He is an applicant I made up, and already I want to turn his need into a reason he should stop asking me questions.

I reach for the paper and write my assessment. Under strengths: excellent judgment. Under concerns: unwilling to restrict its use.

I leave both lines in. He waits.

Source: Human Contractors Are Seeing All Your Horny – and Creepy – AI Prompts