Writers Taking Jobs Writing to Train AI

Posted on September 9, 2024

There are very legitimate concerns that AI can be used to replace content created by human writers. In the meantime, writers are being employed to help train the AI that may one day replace them.

An interesting story by Jack Apollo George in The Guardian describes this unusual new market for writers. George is one of the writers writing for the AI bots. He says the pay is good but his work will only be read internally.

"The workload is flexible, the pay better than we are used to, and the assignments never run out. But what we write will never be read by anyone outside the company."

It may seem counterintuitive that these complex writing programs known as Large language models (LLMs) would need any help at all. The reality is they need a great deal of help or they go completely off the rails. They are not capable of training themselves on their own words.

George says "training our current large language models on their own output doesn’t work." He cites a quote from a Nature article that says, "Indiscriminately learning from data produced by other models causes 'model collapse' – a degenerative process whereby, over time, models forget the true underlying data distribution."

The LLM's inability to learn from itself creates an opportunity for writers - albeit a potentially temporary one should the AIs improve.

George notes that there's an obvious irony to writing for an AI.

"It is like being paid to write in sand, to whisper secrets into a slab of butter. Even if our words could make a dent, we wouldn’t ever be able to recognise it."

Writers seeking work have no doubt seen the job listings by now that seek AI trainers. The Guardian story some remote jobs are paying over £30 an hour (about $40 an hour U.S.). There are also jobs listed as generative AI writers, data labelers and AI model trainers. Bilingual writers and writers with highly technical knowledge will find more opportunities and higher pay.