I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI

"I work as an AI trainer. I assess whether a chatbot's tone is natural or flat, affected or annoying. I identify patterns in pictures of furniture; search the internet for group photos of strangers whom I'll eliminate from the portrait, one by one. I trawl through bizarre videos so I can annotate and time-stamp the barking of a dog, the moment a stranger walks past a window, the precise millisecond a balloon pops."

"I generate anime sex scenes and decapitate young women, coax LLMs into giving me recipes for bombs made of household items, and generate invites to a reprise of January 6 at the White House, all as part of a red team whose purpose is to test safety precautions and probe weaknesses."

"In 2023, Hollywood went on strike, partly to keep the studios from replacing writers and actors with AI. When the strike ended after nearly five months, the entertainment-industry carousel never gained back its momentum. In early 2025-when yet another producer defaulted on a six-figure check I was owed for creating a TV show-I began to look around for some way to keep the wolves at bay."

"AI training wasn't on my radar until a comment in an unofficial Writers Guild of America Facebook group caught my attention. The page was filled with posts from unemployed writers struggling with debt and panicking about their income, begging for tips and ideas and survival strategies: "I am stressed and anxiety-ridden ... simply trying to breathe" ... "ISO food bank/pantry"

AI training includes assessing whether chatbot responses sound natural or flat, identifying furniture patterns in images, and searching online for group photos to remove strangers from portraits. It also involves reviewing unusual videos and time-stamping specific events such as dog barking, a stranger passing a window, and the instant a balloon pops. The work can include generating explicit anime sex scenes and violent content, coaxing language models to provide bomb-making recipes from household items, and creating invitations related to real-world political violence. These tasks are performed as red-team exercises to test safety precautions and probe weaknesses. Separately, Hollywood writing and showrunning face instability after strikes and delayed payments, leading to interest in AI training as a survival option.

Read at WIRED