Hollywood writers are taking AI training gigs to pay rent, finding the work unstable and demoralizing rather than lucrative.

A screenwriter with credits on Paramount and Hulu has completed 20 AI training contracts over eight months with companies including Mercor, Outlier, Task-ify, Turing, Handshake, and Micro1, after Hollywood's 2023 strike and subsequent industry slowdown left her without steady income.

The work involves assessing whether chatbot responses are natural, annotating images and videos (timestamp-level detail), and red-teaming (testing AI safety by probing for harmful outputs). Tasks are offered through contracting platforms that market flexibility but classify the work as "tasks" rather than jobs, with a team leader telling the author not to rely on or expect anything from the work.

Projects start with vague timelines and end without notice—her first assignment, advertised as 20 hours a week for two months, was unplugged after two weeks with no warning; a subsequent "expert" role at $70 an hour failed to begin within the promised week and remained stalled through Thanksgiving.