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Becoming a chatbot, my life as a real estate AI's human backup. By Laura Preston.

The recruiter was a chipper woman with a master's degree in English. Previously, she had worked as an independent bookseller.

Your experience as an English grad student is ideal for this role. She told me. The position was at a company that made artificial intelligence for real estate.

They developed a product called Brenda, a conversational AI that could answer questions about apartment listings.

Brenda had been acquired by a larger company that made software for property managers. And now thousands of properties across the country had put her to work.

Brenda, the recruiter told me, was a sophisticated conversationalist, so fluent that most people who encountered her took her to be human.

But like all conversational AI's, she had some shortcomings. She struggled with idioms and didn't fare well with questions beyond the scope of real estate.

To compensate for these flaws, the company was recruiting a team of employees they called the operators.

The operators kept vigil over Brenda 24 hours a day. When Brenda went off script, an operator took over an emulated Brenda's voice.

Ideally, the customer on the other end would not realize the conversation had changed hands, or that they had even been chatting with a bot in the first place.

Because Brenda used machine learning to improve her responses, she would pick up on the operator's language patterns and gradually adopt them as her own.

It was the spring of 2019. My time as a creative writing student had just come to an end, as had my funding, and the rent was due. I needed a job.

I sent the recruiter my CV. Several phone interviews later, I was signing up for training slots and watching a 45 minute PowerPoint presentation on Fair Housing Law.

I did a little math. An operator made $25 an hour and worked between 15 and 30 hours a week, depending on how lucky they were in the weekly shift lottery.

It wouldn't be enough to cover my rent, but I had no other leads. I packed my things and moved back home to live with my parents in New Jersey.

I was one of about 60 operators. Most of us were poets and writers with MFA's, but there were also PhDs in performance studies and comparative literature, as well as a number of opera singers.

Another demographic evidently well suited for chatbot impersonation, or, I suppose, for impersonating a chatbot that's impersonating a person.

We all convened on a Slack channel. Everyone was aggressively good-natured with leftist politics and pronouns in their display names.

When we weren't talking about Brenda, we were swapping syllabi, soliciting tattoo advice, and distributing e-fliers to our sound and movement workshops.

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