Industry AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-23

The people who struck over AI in 2023 are now paid $12 to $200 an hour to teach it their job

The Guardian reported on 22 August that experienced Hollywood writers, directors and producers are taking gig work training AI models on the exact craft they were hired for: writing a screenplay, building a shooting schedule, judging whether a scene lands. Rates run from roughly $12 to $200 an hour depending on how senior a person the platform is buying. One worker described being handed a shovel and asked to dig the grave of their own profession. The arithmetic behind the choice is not subtle. US jobs in motion picture and sound recording fell from about 450,000 in July 2022 to 326,000 in May 2026 — around 28 percent — and shoot days in Los Angeles dropped 48 percent between 2021 and 2025. Screenwriter Ruth Fowler, who has described eight months and roughly 20 such contracts across platforms including Mercor, Outlier and Turing, says she started because she was always broke, and that production is 'down by 35% or something insane'. The work itself is the unglamorous end of reinforcement learning from human feedback: rating a model's attempt, correcting its tone, annotating footage, flagging when it produces something unsafe.

Why it mattersThree years ago the writers' strike treated AI as an external threat to be bargained against. This is what it looks like when the threat becomes an employer. The skill that made these people expensive — knowing why a scene works — is the thing the models are missing, so it is the thing being bought, by the hour, from the people it is being taken from. It is also a warning that generalises well beyond Hollywood: when an industry contracts, the fastest available work is often teaching the system that contracted it. Doctors, lawyers and academics are already doing the same thing on the same platforms.

✓ Verified · 3 sources

The people who struck over AI in 2023 are now paid $12 to $200 an hour to teach it their job

Related stories