Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI
Editors. Script supervisors. Colour graders. The downstream of the Hollywood strikes wasn’t fewer jobs — it was different jobs, with NDAs.
Part of: AI Reckoning
Ask an unemployed Hollywood editor what they’re working on right now and the answer increasingly comes back as a six-letter username on a piecework platform. They’re training AI. They’re paid hourly. They are not allowed to tell you which model.
The platforms that hire them — Surge, Scale, Outlier, a long tail of smaller shops — pay $25–$80/hour for skilled creative judgement that the labs can’t source from generic crowd workers.
The work itself is mundane: rate this generated dialogue for naturalness, flag this generated scene for continuity errors, rewrite this script section in the voice of a working sitcom room. The rates are roughly half of pre-strike union scale, with no benefits.
Canadian creative workers are absorbed into the same supply chain. Vancouver and Toronto post-production talent is heavily represented on the major platforms, often anonymised behind US-style usernames.
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The cultural irony lands hard. The same workers who lost work to AI’s threat to the writers’ room are now paid to make the next generation of those models better. The NDAs prevent them from saying so publicly. The rent does not prevent them from doing it.
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Sources
Elsewhere on the web
Editorial picks · external- I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI — WIRED
- How a Job at OpenAI Became the Greatest Lottery Ticket of the AI Boom — WSJ via Mint
- Google Stopped a Zero-Day Hack That It Says Was Developed With AI — The Verge
- Oracle Workers Say They Were Fired After Training AI to Replace Them — TIME
- AI Job Loss Is Coming. Does Anyone Have a Plan? — New York Magazine
- The Real Threat of AI Is the Collapse of Trust — Poynter
Original editorial. Written by The Daily Stash Editors. See our editorial policy.