Alice* says she feels “not in the slightest” guilty about using ChatGPT to complete training tasks, saying it is easy to get away with as long as you instruct chatbots to avoid the usual telltale signs of AI output, like a preponderance of em-dashes. “It’s only the sloppiest of users that get caught,” she says. “Anyone with a modicum of awareness around AI hallmarks can tell their output not to use them, and at that point what are you going to do?”

Another worker, Bob*, worked for a training platform called Outlier. Initially, he was tasked with AI training, which he says he illicitly used AI for, and was then promoted to a leadership role where part of his job was to catch others doing the same thing.