Employees earn money by teaching AI to do their jobs – some earn up to $350 an hour

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Employees earn money by teaching AI to do their jobs – some earn up to 0 an hour

Workers are paid to train artificial intelligence systems (1) to think like humans and in some cases, teach machines how to do the very jobs they’ve feared AI would replace.

That’s what happened to Hollywood writer and producer Ruth Fowler. In 2023, entertainment workers (2) went on strike in part out of fear that studios would use AI to replace writers and actors. But after the strike ended, work did not fully return. When another producer defaulted on a six-figure payment he owed, Fowler found himself looking for a way to stay afloat.

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“I was down for easy money. I also needed cash to pay rent, buy food,” Fowler wrote in a Wired article (3). “How hard would it be to teach a machine to take my job? I wasn’t naive enough to believe that this industry wanted what we had to offer—not just our skills, but us.”

But it wasn’t just writers. Companies hire lawyers, doctors, venture capitalists, coders and foreign language speakers to help train AI systems.

A new kind of side hustle

Another company that depends on this trend is Mercor (4), which has a simple message for employees: “get paid to work on AI projects.” Another current Physician Talent Network (5) listing is paying up to $250 an hour for doctors who help train AI systems on medical scenarios, feedback reviews and expert feedback.

And experts say the demand for these roles is expected to grow as AI systems advance. As many large linguistic models have been trained on the vast amount of information available online, the next stage of development is increasingly relying on human input to refine answers, improve accuracy and help systems perform better in specialized areas.

Mercor CEO Brendan Foody told CBS News (6) that the company is looking for technology in almost every field.

“We hire everyone from chess masters to wine lovers to help train [AI] for them to be better, because in the end we want them to know how to give better advice in a game of chess or recommend which wine to have with dinner,” he said.

Hollywood writer Robin Palmer said he now spends about 30 hours a week helping to train AI on projects with Mercor, testing how the technology can produce stronger and more compelling writing.

“They’re changing jobs and you’re looking at, ‘Is this working structurally, what’s the morale like, are there subtle changes?'” he told CBS News (7). “I’m really interested in seeing how AI is improving. It’s almost like working with a student and saying, ‘Yeah, he’s getting better.’

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The fine print of AI works

For Fowler, the day-to-day reality of the job looked very different. One of his first assignments involved reviewing conversations between users and AI chatbots, measuring how the systems responded to deeply personal questions and scoring responses on a scale of one to five.

But flexibility and the promise of easy money came with a reality check. Fowler recalled getting a late-night Slack message from a team leader warning him not to lean on work.

“These are not jobs,” Fowler remembers being told.” These are “jobs,” and we are “employees.”

That uncertainty may be one of the reasons many workers remain uneasy about the growing role of AI in the workplace. Although these projects are creating new ways for some people to earn money, a recent study by the Pew Research Center (8) found that more than half of workers are concerned about the long-term impact of AI on the workplace, while almost one-third believe that the technology could end up reducing job opportunities in the coming years.

An opportunity or a warning sign

Palmer acknowledged that some in Hollywood may view working with AI as controversial, but said he believes experienced professionals can help shape the technology responsibly, while recognizing that the growth of AI in the workplace may be difficult to avoid.

“The train has left the station,” he said. “So you want AI to be good because it’s trained by good people, or not?”

AI training has become an unexpected income stream for some workers and a way to stay relevant as industries change rapidly. Others see it as raising uncomfortable questions about whether they are helping to create tools that could ultimately reduce the demand for their skills.

Fowler remained strong in the second camp. After trying to make a living in the emerging AI economy, he wrote that the experience turned out to be “much more brutal than I could have imagined.”

“They will be tasked with making us work faster, and longer, with more precision, more control, fewer errors, fewer overheads, fewer costs. To humanize the machine, they will make us more like a machine,” he wrote.

That tension may define the next phase of AI in the workplace: some see an opportunity to adapt and capitalize on a fast-growing industry, while others feel like they’re training someone else before fully understanding what’s next.