I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI
Key takeaways
- I assess whether a chatbot’s tone is natural or flat, affected or annoying.
- This story was supported by a generous grant from the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
- In my “other” career, I am a Hollywood writer and showrunner.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Animation: Anastasia Kraynyuk Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story My name on the platform is ri611. Or h924092b12ee797f, depending on who’s paying me.
I work as an AI trainer. I assess whether a chatbot’s tone is natural or flat, affected or annoying. I identify patterns in pictures of furniture; search the internet for group photos of strangers whom I’ll eliminate from the portrait, one by one. I trawl through bizarre videos so I can annotate and time-stamp the barking of a dog, the moment a stranger walks past a window, the precise millisecond a balloon pops. I generate anime sex scenes and decapitate young women, coax LLMs into giving me recipes for bombs made of household items, and generate invites to a reprise of January 6 at the White House, all as part of a red team whose purpose is to test safety precautions and probe weaknesses. I work for companies with names like Mercor and Outlier and Task-ify and Turing and Handshake and Micro1.
This story was supported by a generous grant from the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.