Some white-collar workers who lost out to AI are now being paid to help perfect the tech that sidelined them, often in ways that feel just as precarious. That's the uneasy reality documented by the Verge's Josh Dzieza, who follows lawyers, writers, designers, coders, and scientists now piecing together contract work for data vendors like Mercor, Scale AI, and Surge AI, building the training material behind systems such as as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. Dzieza describes a booming but unstable "data-supply chain": Workers invent prompts to trip up models, draft gold-standard answers, annotate audio and video, or even simulate entire corporate worlds—only to see their projects suddenly paused, their pay cut, or their access silently revoked.
"Those who couldn't meet the new demands got 'offboarded' and replaced by new recruits," Dzieza writes of what happened to some individuals who worked for Mercor. Many say they're micromanaged by monitoring software, bound by strict secrecy, and supervised by very young managers, all while trying to compete for tasks that may ultimately automate what they once did full time. "One documentary-maker who's won Emmys, he messaged me and he was like, 'I'm being handed a shovel and told to dig my own grave,' and that's exactly how everyone thinks about it," one screenwriter who's taken on some of this AI work tells Dzieza. The story also traces emerging lawsuits over worker classification (i.e., individual contractors vs. regular salaried workers) and dives deeper into the bigger question: Is AI creating a new class of heavily surveilled, disposable-knowledge labor? More here.
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