For funders and partners
Fund the record.
The AI Anonymous Tipline collects and protects stories from workers on the receiving end of AI mandates, then publishes what the stories reveal.
What this is
Every corporation, school, and agency is rolling out AI from the top down. The public story of that rollout is written by the executives buying the software and the companies selling it. The workers being told to use it, train it, and compete with it have no shared mic.
The Tipline is that mic. Workers submit what is being demanded of them, what they are watching happen around them, and what they are doing about it. We paraphrase, anonymize, organize by industry, and publish it back: a growing public record of AI rollouts from the ground, and the resistance and reclamation of power.
Ridicule is a public service. Satire is a civic duty. We use comedy to help this material get watched, shared, and repeated.
What already happened
Two Instagram posts. No form, no site, no launch. What arrived anyway: complete stories sent by direct message from workers in tech, insurance, and automotive. More stories volunteered in public comments, from nursing, law, libraries, and call centers. An audience proposing formats, cadences, and civic uses unprompted. Independent submissions from the same industry, weeks apart, already showcasing the patterns this record exists to surface.
People want to tell these stories and people want to read them. The site is live and the form works. What is missing is the editorial capacity to handle volume responsibly.
From the record
The first story cleared for publication. An insurance claims worker sent it by direct message before this site existed. We paraphrased it, they approved every word, and it appears here as they approved it.
I work in insurance claims, and the amount of AI in our work is hard to overstate. Customers and employees are both frustrated, and none of us got a choice. We can't even trust the spell check anymore.
So I retaliate in small ways. The email system got a reaction feature nobody asked for, so I now react to every single email I receive, whether it's from the CEO, my supervisor, or a vendor. Every one gets a thumbs up, a heart, or a frown. And every time management rolls out a new tool with a "here's our new AI to do X" presentation, I ask all the questions, especially about the parts they gloss over, because that's the part they don't have answers for. Who do I call when it breaks? Where does the data go? I've become known as the person who asks everything, and now coworkers ask me to ask for them. I have zero concerns about being the person to speak up at workplace fuckery because I am happy to be the shield.
It's only gotten worse. At a recent all-hands, leadership bragged about how big our new data center is going to be. After the new year, every call we take will be recorded and transcribed by AI and we'll be expected to go back and correct our claim notes to match, because the transcripts might be subpoenaed. I asked how we're supposed to handle customers who don't want to be recorded. No real answer.
Meanwhile a competitor has gone completely off the rails. I had one call with them that passed me between three different AI voices, one of which said "ummm" and "like" to convince me it was a person. My whole team makes fun of that company, and we are copying them anyway.
Now the injury attorneys who call us have AI that starts recording the moment anyone picks up, so we've been told to announce, immediately, on every call, that we do not consent to being recorded. Nobody has said what happens if the machine on the other end doesn't care.
A teacher at a charter school shared this with us before this site existed, then sent an update when we asked to publish it. We edited it lightly and publish it without their name, with their permission.
I'm a teacher at a charter school. Leadership is trying to develop their own AI and is having teachers "beta test" it. This year we are expected to use AI in the classroom regularly to "tutor" our students. The goal of the ai? To teach children. I'm asked to train ai to replace me.
Good news, the ai system sucks and won't replace anything any time soon.
I work with younger students who cannot tell the difference between AI and animation. Having them use AI when they can't distinguish things like that feels like a gross misuse of technology.
What support funds
- Editorial protection: a dedicated triage editor who reads everything, scrubs identifying details, and maintains the record. Source protection is the load-bearing wall of this project, and it is labor.
- Infrastructure: privacy-respecting intake, separated storage, a Signal channel for high-stakes submissions, and the public record.
- The record: pattern reports every four to six weeks synthesizing what the corpus reveals, built to be cited by journalists, researchers, and policymakers.
- The storytelling: a recurring comedy segment inside the Life With Machines video podcast, built on the submissions, with clips for social platforms.
Who's behind it
Life With Machines is a public interest media company focused on helping us live well with tech and not just endure it, by bringing clarity, critique, curiosity, and some comedy to the AI discourse. It won the 2026 Webby People's Voice Award for Best Creative Use of AI and Technology.
Baratunde Thurston is host and co-creator of Life With Machines. Host of How To Citizen and PBS's America Outdoors. Previously Director of Digital at The Onion and Supervising Producer at The Daily Show. Author, speaker, and storyteller on technology, power, democracy, and how we live well together.
The Tipline is a project of Life With Machines, LLC. Where a funder requires 501(c)(3) status, we have a fiscal sponsor.
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