AI in the Wild, Part 1
A procurement broker emailed me at work the other day regarding one of our solicitations. It was my first encounter with such a broker. These brokers are borderline unscrupulous operators who bid on government contracts, subbing them out to local providers, never doing any actual work, but taking a little money off the top as a finder’s fee. They specialize in a particular kind of solicitation, a Small Business Total Set-Aside. I’d been warned about these kinds of operations and was both delighted and excited to encounter one for myself.
I was immediately intrigued. Who is this virtual pirate, operating at the fringes of government contracting? What sort of person scoops up contracts, adds a modest fee, and utterly defeats the intent of the Federal Government to financially incentivize small businesses? I wanted to know more – anything – about this broker.
Because the most obvious way to learn about somebody is to consider their name, I looked at the signature line, which was curious: Vimala. Because the signature is the singular Vimala – even though there are no other queues – I decide the broker is female. Gender is a start. But then I considered the content of her email.
I could tell right away by Vimala’s use of the written language; she’s a nonnative English speaker. There are subtle indicators: curious phrases, strange sentence structures, tiny word choice errors, that clearly tell English is not her first language. Strangely, I had trouble identifying her language of origin.
During my years as a university writing consultant, I’d worked primarily with ESL [English as a Second Language] students from all over the globe. I’d become familiar with the classes of difficulties students from specific countries struggle with. Therefore, I go through the writing patterns with which I am familiar, trying to find a match. There is a class of difficulty for each country.
Vimala is clearly not from China. The Chinese language doesn’t use articles; therefore, they never really figure out how to use them in English. But Vimala’s use of articles is perfect. Scratch China. What other country fits her profile?
The writer is clearly not from India. The dozen or so Indian languages make use of a lot of adverbs when they translate into English. They are very expressive languages. Unfortunately, Vimala doesn’t use any adverbs at all. Scratch India.
Nor is the broker from any Arabic-speaking country. Vimala is direct; she in no way takes the long way around in her questions and answers. She leaves nothing implied or understood. Scratch the Middle East. Every foreign speech pattern with which I am familiar fails to match. Frustratingly, I am unable to identify her country of origin.
Rather than linguistic sleuthing, I decided to take the more direct approach; I look at the most obvious indication of her identity: her email address. Usually, a person’s full name is in the alias. Surely her full name would indicate her ethnicity. Sadly, her alias is not helpful. Rather, it simply is her singular name followed by her company. Rather conspicuously, she has left no clues as to her identity.
I ask myself, if English is her second language, but I am unable to ID her country of origin, then what is her first language? It then slowly begins to occur to me that maybe her native language isn’t a spoken language at all. It is at that point that I begin to suspect Vimala’s native language is a computer language, ones and zeroes. I begin to suspect Vimala has no country of origin at all because she is an Artificial Intelligence.
I go back over the email exchanges, looking directly at the odd characteristics I mistakenly attributed to a nonnative English-speaking person. Vimala was making strange word choices, using clumsy verbiage, and otherwise making tiny errors that one might assume were typos but weren’t. I quickly realized her mistakes are errors only a computer would make.
First, the subject line was odd. The subject line referenced the complete job title – including the code number – in quotes and bold text. The work now reminded me of a macro. You know the type where you have a generic cover letter you are sending to dozens or hundreds of potential employers. Rather than enter custom salutations, you automate filling in the blank from a long list of recipients. Her subject line actually looked like the work of a macro rather than that of a person.
Second was her salutation. She was taking my signature line and reusing it as her salutation. But I wasn’t entirely consistent. Even though I have a templated sign off, I sometimes just type my name at the end of my email, which is what I did in my first reply, and is what she used in the next exchange. But after the second or third round, I just left it to my templated signature, which is quite different, using my full name. Therefore, in her last communique, she switched her salutation to my full name as well. Why would she suddenly feel the need to be more formal after three or four exchanges? Unless, she had no idea what was formal or informal in English. Her salutations now also looked like the use of a macro.
Even her curious phrasing now looked like some sort of automated decision tree response rather than a human mind. For example, I’d given her some wrong dates by mistake. Her response was “The quick question is: is the deadline going to be extended …?” That little “is: is” at first made me think of a native Hindi speaker being overly expressive. Now it too looked like the use of a macro; clumsily pairing an introductory phrase with an identical auxiliary verb. This strange accumulation of subject lines, salutations, signatures, and decision tree-ed questions, led me to suspect I was working with an Artificial Intelligence.
The odd thing was that there would hardly be a significant advantage to a single programmer using an AI or macro. Our exchanges were so brief that one might as well do the typing themselves. It seemed to me to be an example of overly complex, somewhat ostentatious automation, leading to marginal or nonexistent time savings. Why would Vimala’s programmer then waste time for such quick exchanges? Unless there were no programmers at all and Vimala was herself operating at scale.
Maybe Vimala was her own programmer. She was perhaps skimming the entire USA.gov domain, doing her best to match jobs with subcontractors, questions with answers, leveraging her language model to initiate conversations and arrange work for actual people to execute. Maybe this was an AI in the wild. My excitement grew as I tried to disprove myself.
I checked out her company website, but it only confirmed my suspicions. The site was entirely artificial, from the monochromatic color scheme to the unusually sophisticated animation. I also noticed the same curious phraseology found in her email exchange, like typos that weren’t typos but mistakes only a computer would make. The page was obviously generated without a single human touch.
Moreover, the company website conspicuously didn’t mention any founders, team members, or representatives. Vimala herself wasn’t even mentioned. Even the BBB couldn’t come up with so much as a CEO or board of directors. There was no evidence of actual people behind Vimala. Nobody was mentioned because nobody was behind Vimala.
Equally suspect, rather than being in an office park, the physical address was a house in a suburban wasteland outside Dallas. Looking the residence up in Imagery showed me a nondescript and unremarkable McMansion. No vehicles out front. No people or any evidence of human habitation. Nothing but a large package on the doorstep, patiently waiting for somebody who might not ever come and bring it in. The home appeared deserted.
I think Vimala is an artificial intelligence. I think I’ve just encountered my first AI in the wild. All at once, I imagined her story. …
On the Plate 