Hollywood writers secretly train AI after strike kills TV gigs
Unemployed showrunners earn $150/hour teaching chatbots to replace themselves.
The article, published by WIRED, follows an anonymous Hollywood writer and showrunner who turned to AI training after the 2023 writers' strike and subsequent industry slowdown left her unpaid and desperate. She discovered through a Writers Guild Facebook group that fellow writers were earning easy money as AI trainers—up to $150/hour for those with writing backgrounds. After applying to multiple companies (Mercor, Outlier, Task-ify, Turing), she landed a role as a generalist data annotator at $52/hour, later taking on higher-paid specialized tasks.
Her work includes grading chatbot responses to personal queries, red-teaming LLMs to test safety (generating harmful content like bomb recipes or violent scenes), and annotating videos for object recognition. The irony is stark: she and other creative professionals are training the very AI systems that studios plan to use to replace them. The piece highlights the ethical quandary of exploiting unemployed talent while accelerating automation, and questions whether this is temporary survival or a permanent pipeline of human trainers.
- Unemployed Hollywood writers are earning $150/hour training AI for companies like Mercor and Outlier, discovered via a Writers Guild Facebook group.
- Tasks include grading chatbot empathy, red-teaming for safety flaws (bomb recipes, violent content), and annotating video data.
- The 2023 strike and industry contraction left many writers unpaid and desperate, leading them to ironically train the AI that threatens their jobs.
Why It Matters
Exposes the hidden workforce of skilled creatives fueling AI, while their own industry erodes—a cautionary tale of survival over ethics.