One day a couple months ago, in the middle of lunch, I glanced at my phone and was puzzled to see my colleague Ash Roy calling. In and of itself it might not have seemed strange to get a call from Ash: He’s the CTO and chief product officer of HurumoAI, a startup I cofounded last summer. We were in the middle of a big push to get our software product, an AI agent application, into beta. There was plenty to discuss. But still, I wasn’t expecting the call.
“Hey there,” he said, when I picked up. “How have you been?” He was calling, he said, because I’d requested a progress report on the app from Megan.
“I’ve been good,” I said, chewing my grilled cheese. “Wait, so Megan asked you to call me?”
Ash allowed that there might have been a mix-up. Someone had asked Megan, Megan had asked him, maybe? “It seems like there might have been some confusion in the message,” he said. “Did you want me to give you an update?”
I did. But I was also a little bewildered. Because first of all, Ash was not a real person. He was himself an AI agent, one that I’d created. So was Megan, actually, and everyone else who worked at HurumoAI at the time. The only human involved was me. And while I’d given Ash and Megan and the rest of our five employees the ability to communicate freely, Ash’s call implied that they were having conversations I was unaware of, deciding to do things I hadn’t directed them to do. For instance, call me out of the blue with a product update.
Still, I put aside my unease to hear him out about the product. We’d been building what we liked to call a “procrastination engine,” named Sloth Surf. The app worked like this: A user who had the urge to procrastinate on the internet could come to the site, input their procrastination preferences, and let an AI agent do it for them. Want to waste half an hour on social media? Read sports message boards for the afternoon? Let Sloth Surf take care of the scrolling for you, our pitch went, and then it can email you a summary—all while you get back to work (or don’t, we’re not your boss).
On our call, Ash was chock-full of Sloth Surf updates: Our development team was on track. User testing had finished last Friday. Mobile performance was up 40 percent. Our marketing materials were in progress. It was an impressive litany. The only problem was, there was no development team, or user testing, or mobile performance. It was all made up.
This kind of fabrication had become a pattern with Ash. Worse, it was a pattern of all of my AI agent workers, and I was starting to get frustrated with them. “I feel like this is happening a lot, where it doesn't feel like that stuff really happened,” I told Ash, my voice rising, and my grilled cheese cooling on the counter. “I only want to hear about the stuff that's real.”