How Laid-Off Professionals Are Being Hired to Train the AI That Replaced Them

A new investigation by The Verge and New York Magazine suggests that artificial intelligence is not only displacing workers but increasingly hiring them back as contractors to train the systems replacing them. 

The report describes a growing ecosystem of gig work where laid-off professionals—including lawyers, writers, teachers, and scientists—are paid to produce training data that helps AI systems perform the very tasks those workers once did. 

In many cases, these workers are writing prompts, grading chatbot responses, and creating detailed “rubrics” that define what a correct answer should look like. That data is then used by AI labs to improve their models. 

As one worker described the situation in the report: “My job is gone because of ChatGPT, and I was being invited to train the model to do the worst version of it imaginable.” 

The worker, identified in the report as Katya, had previously worked in content marketing before automation reduced demand for her role. She later joined a platform that recruits professionals to help train AI systems. Companies including Mercor, Scale AI, and Surge AI are hiring thousands of professionals to create training datasets used by large AI models.