The Digester

Thousands of lawyers, writers, designers and other experts are being hired to create and grade the data that trains AI, but abrupt pauses, pay cuts, intense surveillance and secrecy are leaving many in precarious gig work and prompting legal challenges.

Platforms like Mercor, Scale AI and Surge AI hire thousands of professionals to write rubrics, golden outputs and other training data for AI models.
Work is highly secretive, short term and monitored by software that tracks activity to the second.
Pay, task expectations and hours often change without warning, pushing workers into unpaid overtime and fierce competition.
Some projects drop rates to as low as $16 per hour, creating earnings below local minimums for many contributors.
Multiple lawsuits in California accuse data vendors of misclassifying contractors and exerting extraordinary control, signaling growing legal scrutiny.

Skilled workers are training the AI that can replace their jobs

Articles