Source: Wired
Entertainment industry precarity has a new iteration: trained screenwriters and narrative professionals are now micro-laboring for AI companies like Mercor, annotating data and refining models at rates below their previous guild-protected work. This is genuine downward mobility for credentialed creatives—actual hollowing of middle-skill entertainment work, where AI development outsources labor-intensive training tasks to the exact workers whose skills it aims to replace. The cycle compounds: studios reduce writing staff due to productivity tools, writers fill gig platforms, their unpaid or underpaid annotations improve those same tools faster.