Hollywood writers pivot to AI training
unemployed hollywood writers and showrunners are secretly working as ai trainers for companies like mercor and outlier, earning up to $150 an hour to annotate data and red-team models.
unemployed hollywood writers are increasingly joining the gig economy to train ai, taking roles at firms like mercor, outlier, and turing. prompted by financial instability after the 2023 strikes and subsequent production defaults, writers apply their literary skills to rate chatbot responses, annotate video, and conduct red-teaming to bypass safety filters. compensation is high—often cited as $150/hour for experts—but the work involves unpaid testing, automated interviews, and emotionally taxing content moderation. this trend highlights the blurred lines between human creative labor and the data pipeline powering generative models, as industry professionals essentially help build the automation that threatens their primary careers.