I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI

Somewhere between Hollywood writers' rooms and the cold hum of server farms, a strange new labor economy has taken root. A TV showrunner whose credits span Paramount, Hulu, and the BBC found herself, after the 2023 Hollywood strike gutted the industry, applying to train artificial intelligence, drawn in by a Facebook post promising $150 an hour for "easy money." What followed was anything but. Abrupt firings, vanishing Slack channels, projects that evaporated overnight, wages quietly sliding from $150 down to $16 an hour, sometimes below California's minimum wage. Young project managers sent rocket ship emojis at 3 a.m. urging workers to "lock in." "It feels like we are all in a fishbowl waiting for our human masters to drop some food," one worker wrote. The cruel irony isn't lost: the very writers being asked to make AI more human are, in the process, being made more like machines.