If a job you apply for a job and it turns out it's not what it's advertised to be, there's nothing unethical in declining the job. The fact that the platform doesn't have a way of saying "nevermind thanks, not what I signed up for" is not the authors fault.
They were explicitly looking to do work for an AI, when it turned out to be a human driven marketing stunt they declined.
They didn't decline because the idea "came from a brainstorm" with a human, that message was much later.
They declined because the note on the flowers had a from line that was an AI startup. When you were otherwise on board with an unsolicited flower delivery and a social media post to make the sender look good, that's a picky reason to deny it, and saying it's "not what they signed up for" is a pretty big exaggeration.
Except they didn't decline, they ghosted, and that's just bad behavior.
> An agent, named Adi, would pay me $110 to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Anthropic, as a special thanks for developing Claude, its chatbot.
> This wasn’t mentioned in the listing, but the name of an AI startup was featured at the bottom of the note I was supposed to deliver with the flowers.
The job was presented as delivering flower as a thank you, but instead was a marketing stunt. Unless you think the AI just spontaneously decided to sign it's thank you note with a random unaffiliated AI startups name.
The job was delivering a flower and posting about it on social media, it was clearly to make the sender look good from the start. It's self-promotion versus a slightly different kind of self-promotion. And I think the signature was equally as spontaneous as the rest of the job.
They were explicitly looking to do work for an AI, when it turned out to be a human driven marketing stunt they declined.