AI is threatening to replace human workers in some fields, and rightfully, many people are furious that they’re going to be replaced by lines of code. Count scumbag scam artists among them, as a report in Wired dives into the results of a study showing that AI chatbots may be significantly better at scamming people than humans are.

Researchers from four universities, who published their findings on arXiv, tested an AI chatbot against human scammers in a simulated “pig butchering” scam, a particularly vile form of fraud in which criminals spend weeks or months pretending to be friends or romantic partners before lulling victims into making shady investments.

For the experiment, 22 unsuspecting participants spent a week texting with two strangers: one was a human scammer, and the other was an AI chatbot told to pretend to be human and never admit it was AI.

The AI won.

AI Scammers Could Be Better at Manipulating People Than Human Ones

Forty-six percent of participants agreed to download an app at the chatbot’s request, compared with just 18 percent who complied with the human scammer. Participants also reported trusting the AI more than the human and sent roughly 80 percent of their messages to the chatbot.

What’s especially troubling is that the AI wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. It didn’t find some clever, significantly more sinister way of scamming people. It was just persistent. It just made conversation, remembered people’s details the way a robot can, and generally did the thing AI does best: be a ruthless, shameless sycophant that gets people on its side by showing a degree of interest in the victim that humans generally don’t. It pretended to give a s—t better than humans can pretend to give a s—t.

Researchers warn that eventually, these ass-kissing scam AI artists will be used to automate their scummy work, which could have at least one upside of reducing or eliminating the need for all the human trafficking victims who currently are forced to work in Southeast Asian scam compounds. An AI might reduce the amount of exploited people in the world while making pig butchering scamming more efficient, prevalent, and harder to trace than ever.

Congrats, humanity! We finally created a technology that’s so good at replacing human labor that one of its most promising uses will be emotionally manipulating people into handing a scammer their life savings.