Source work
Rumpelstiltskin
Adaptation proposal
A · Faithful to the source's premise, transposed into an AI world
Adaptation note
Faithful to the source's original premise — a hidden mechanism extracts an escalating, ultimately identity-tied price, and its power collapses the instant its true nature is correctly named — transposed directly into an AI world: an unregistered 'AI' service that quietly launders exploited human labor as machine inference extracts a perpetual claim on a struggling team's future work, defeated when a junior engineer traces the traffic patterns back to what it actually is.
Adapted into
AI Fairy Tale · Transparency
Naming Gilder
A struggling team paid an unregistered 'AI' service in escalating access — data, architecture, finally a perpetual claim on their future work — for benchmark results it never explained. A junior engineer traced the traffic logs and found human shift patterns where machine inference should have been.