{"id":1799619,"date":"2026-06-24T17:45:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T17:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/?p=1799619"},"modified":"2026-06-24T17:45:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T17:45:18","slug":"hollywood-workers-are-training-ai-models-as-job-prospects-grow-slim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/hollywood-workers-are-training-ai-models-as-job-prospects-grow-slim\/","title":{"rendered":"Hollywood Workers Are Training AI Models As Job Prospects Grow Slim"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tIn 2023, concerns over the rise of generative AI<\/a> animated the writers\u2019 and actors\u2019 strikes, with many rank-and-file workers fearful that it could put wide swaths of the entertainment industry out of work. Three years later, with those concerns still alive and well, some Hollywood workers have been moonlighting in AI training, working to help improve the tech, anyway.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Hollywood adapts to the technology \u2014 particular corners of the business running towards it, others away \u2014 a smattering of creatives have begun to go public with their time in the world of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). In May writer Ruth Fowler (Little Disasters<\/em>, Rules of the Game<\/em>) published a personal essay<\/a> for Wired<\/em> about her own experience with AI training jobs, a field she says she resorted to as entertainment work dried up and she needed money to pay rent and buy groceries. The same month screenwriter Robin Palmer, who has written TV movies for Disney Channel and Hallmark, spoke with CBS News<\/a> about working in AI training, even as she admitted that some in her field might compare it to crossing the picket line.<\/p>\n

\n\tEditor Gabe Sena is another entertainment worker whose side hustle is helping to fine-tune AI models. \u201cI\u2019m mid-career and I don\u2019t want to be a dinosaur in my field,\u201d he explains to The Hollywood Reporter<\/em>. \u201cThis is a thing that people are fearful of, that seems like a black box to a lot of people who aren\u2019t in the tech industry. And so it made more sense to me to try to immerse myself in it as opposed to just going, \u2018I don\u2019t like that it\u2019s new.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the traditional film and television job market narrows, this kind of gig work is on the rise and current and former entertainment workers are taking part. The phenomenon is raising uncomfortable questions in a creative community where the use of the tech can be a third-rail topic, as illustrated by the recent saga<\/a> of animator Jorge Gutierrez dropping out of a generative AI series he was set to create for Amazon following backlash. Are these workers proactively helping to contribute to an eventual displacement of jobs in the industry? Or are they simply trying to survive in a system where AI adoption is moving full steam ahead due to forces far larger than any individual?<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Sena, the decision was one rooted in curiosity about the future and how he should be preparing himself. A University of California Los Angeles film school alum, Sena typically edits small documentaries and videos for nonprofits like the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the Children\u2019s Defense Fund. He says he was eager to learn more about AI when he was between jobs in the summer of 2025. \u201cIt was very open curiosity and not even being 100 percent clear about exactly the sort of work I would be doing,\u201d he says. He signed on for a job facilitated through a recruiting platform for AI work called Mercor.<\/p>\n

\n\tMercor was founded in 2023 by three college dropouts and Thiel Fellows, or participants of billionaire Peter Thiel\u2019s program offering funding and connections to people who leave college or never attend and want to \u201cbuild new things.\u201d Backed by the venture capital firms Benchmark, General Catalyst, Robinhood Ventures, Felicis and Menlo Ventures, Mercor\u2019s lodestar is \u201corganizing human intelligence to power the AI economy,\u201d or providing domain experts to improve AI models. Its $350 million series C funding round in 2025 valued the firm at $10 billion.<\/p>\n

\n\tThough he can\u2019t disclose specifically what he\u2019s worked on \u2014 Sena, like many workers in this field, has signed non-disclosure agreements \u2014 he says one of his recent jobs involved comparing prompts given to a generative AI system with its outputs and seeing how the two matched up.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen asked whether he\u2019s concerned that this kind of work will replace jobs in the future, Sena says he believes some roles may be \u201cphased out\u201d but workers who are capable, diligent and adaptable will be able to maintain their careers. \u201cThere\u2019s some parts of my job that I would be happy to hand off to a very intelligent sort of way of doing things,\u201d he adds. \u201cBut even if it seems like rote tasks, there\u2019s a lot of subjectivity in what I do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLike Sena, Steven Woolworth, a former development executive with HBO and Studio TF1 America, felt he had to dive headfirst into AI rather than shy away from it. After a grueling year-and-a-half period of fruitless job searching in Hollywood, Woolworth came to this world through a friend \u2014 a member of the Writers Guild of America \u2014 forwarding an email from Mercor.<\/p>\n

\n\tWoolworth, who says he is a supporter of AI regulations and guardrails in entertainment, explains, \u201cI looked at it one of two ways. I can keep my head buried in the sand or I can enter this world and get a very inside perspective of what is happening in AI training and its capabilities. And also be a part, obviously a very small part, of a team of people training this so it becomes productive in a healthy and positive way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe work has \u201ckept a roof over my head for the past year, [of] which I am deeply appreciative,\u201d he says. And he doesn\u2019t believe it could replace his prior occupation as an executive, saying that tech can\u2019t go to in-person events like film festivals or a play to discover new talent. \u201cObviously none of us know what the future holds, but I know today it can\u2019t do the essential human things that I do,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t(At left): Editor Gabe Sena is an entertainment worker whose side hustle is helping to fine-tune AI models; (At right) Steven Woolworth, a former development executive with HBO and Studio TF1 America, found work training AI at Mercor.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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\n\tRLHF operates as a three-part process. First a human scores a model\u2019s outputs \u2014 say, how likely a character in a drama would be to react to news of a tragedy with a host of jokes or expressions of sympathy \u00a0\u2014 going back with one score after another to various responses. Once a data set is fully trained on those responses, the AI itself trains a second\u00a0\u201creward model,\u201d which is then used to train the original AI, removing the humans from the process.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe actual job for human reinforcers can be mind-numbing. A machine makes choices that go anywhere from reasonable to laughable, and a human tells it what it got right or wrong. One veteran writer who helped train a model described an environment akin to a high-school standardized test, with a strict human proctor in the room telling people what they can and can\u2019t do as one output after another flashed across their screens. What at first felt fun \u2014 like guiding a sweet wayward child \u2014 soon felt like a crazymaking psychological experiment.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHow many times can you tell a machine it\u2019s wrong without losing your mind?\u201d the person recalled.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the last few years AI companies have been reportedly shifting from training their models with the help of data annotators (who, in some instances, have experienced allegedly exploitative and toxic<\/a> working<\/a> conditions<\/a>) doing drudging work in developing countries. Now, firms are seeking \u201cexperts\u201d in their field, not just Hollywood professionals but also doctors and lawyers, who can earn, depending on their expertise, more than $100 an hour by helping make an AI tool sound more human and by correcting its mistakes in specialty areas, among other tasks.<\/p>\n

\n\tUnlike traditional Hollywood, this is a growing sector. According to data provided by the jobs platform Indeed, the share of job postings related to AI within the arts category doubled between May 2025 to April 2026, from nearly five percent to nearly 11 percent. That growth is greater than even job postings related to AI broadly, which rose from 2.8 percent in May 2025 to 5.5 percent by April 2026. As of press time, \u201ccreative writers\u201d could earn \u201cup to $44 an hour\u201d to help on an AI project facilitated through jobs platform Handshake; a \u201cmusic professional\u201d with a master\u2019s degree or above could earn \u201cup to $100 an hour.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLabor<\/a> complaints have dogged the field of AI training as it\u2019s grown in the U.S. Workers have described in published news<\/a> reports<\/a> highly unstable employment, cutthroat environments as demand for jobs exceeds supply, rushed work and lack of information about who, exactly, is the client. Two major firms that provide RLHF work, Surge AI<\/a> and Scale AI, have been accused of unpaid wages and worker misclassification as well as exposing workers to traumatizing content in lawsuits, respectively.<\/p>\n

\n\tEven Hollywood critics of the generative AI economy express sympathy for those working in this precarious field. One of those people is Breaking Bad<\/em> and Pluribus<\/em> creator Vince Gilligan. \u201cI\u2019ve been extraordinarily lucky throughout my career, so I\u2019m not going to judge folks who are simply trying to provide for their families,\u201d he wrote to The Hollywood Reporter<\/em> in an email.\u00a0\u201cI just thank god I\u2019ve never been faced with that choice myself.\u00a0And I appreciate that my career started in 1990, not 2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAdds Sam Tung, a storyboard artist who worked on Citadel<\/em> and Twisters<\/em>, \u201cThe people who are taking this work are not doing it because they\u2019re eager to undercut other human workers. People are really struggling in this current downturn and they have mortgages to pay and kids to feed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Tim Friedlander, a voice actor who leads the National Association of Voice Actors (NAVA), cautions that this work may offer short-term gains with long-term consequences. AI training opportunities currently proliferate on go-to job platforms for his peers like Voices dot com and Voice123 but, Friedlander says, a recent survey from the organization found that about 20 percent of respondents have knowingly lost jobs due to work being done by AI tools. NAVA\u2019s stance is currently that no licensing or training deals should take place in voiceover.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI don\u2019t really necessarily fault somebody if you\u2019re all of a sudden you\u2019re given potentially $1,200 for four hours worth of work. Then it\u2019s really enticing, but that may be the only four hours you\u2019re ever going to work in that job,\u201d he adds. \u201cI think in the long term it is more damaging to the entire creative sector to be training these systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tThe Writers Guild of America is in a difficult position as its members are taking AI training jobs even as leadership advocates against those same AI systems.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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\n\tThe guilds are in a tough position. The specter of members helping to train systems leadership opposes would seem to present an easy path for the groups: issue guidance against (if not an outright ban on) taking the work. But at least two writers \u2014 both active in WGA politics \u2014 noted they believe WGA leaders\u2019 hands are tied on RLHF, and in fact their group and others might be in a kind of Catch-22. They can\u2019t tell members not to use their skills to make money, especially at a time when so many are struggling to find regular work. Of course if they don\u2019t stop it then people could be struggling even more and they\u2019ll really need to take these gigs.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen asked if they had a policy on members working in AI training, major Hollywood unions reached for this story either said they had no comment or never responded.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn some ways, the cat may have already come out of the bag. In 2025, Disney and Universal filed suit<\/a> against the image and video generator Midjourney, alleging plagiarism after, they argued, company vacuumed up copywritten material on the Internet as training data; later that year, Warner Bros. Discovery also sued<\/a> the company with similar claims. Says storyboard artist Phil Langone (Thunderbolts*<\/em>, Skeleton Crew<\/em>), \u201cI\u2019m an artist and I know it\u2019s crawled my own work and it\u2019s stolen from me. I\u2019m like, \u2018Well, that war was lost before we even knew it was being fought.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHow\u00a0much RLHF could ultimately improve models for writing or anything else is an open question among engineers. While there\u2019s little doubt that humans are helpful and even necessary\u00a0in training machines \u2014 the technique is so powerful it won its creator the prestigious Turing Award last year \u2014 it also is hardly foolproof. Among RLHF\u2019s challenges are sycophancy, which will have a model essentially agreeing with a human trainee but then generating what it wants\u00a0to in a real-life situation anyway. That could make the model weaker and actually pose less of a threat to human entertainment workers worried about getting disrupted out of a job.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, AI companies seemingly need subject matter experts to turn the slop into more polished outputs \u2014 which could, in turn, convince more entertainment companies to hire fewer humans. And in desperate times, people don\u2019t tend to think in hypotheticals or a decade out. When asked if he has friends in Hollywood also working in AI training, Woolworth said, \u201cYes.\u201d He adds, \u201cAnd a lot that are certainly trying.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.hollywoodreporter.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 O artigo anterior foi obtido e traduzido do site internacional da celebrity.land \u2019 Source Link <\/em><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2023, concerns over the rise of generative AI animated the writers\u2019 and actors\u2019 strikes, with many rank-and-file workers fearful that it could put wide swaths of the entertainment industry out of work. Three years later, with those concerns still alive and well, some Hollywood workers have been moonlighting in AI training, working to help […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1799620,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1799619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entretenimento"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1799619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1799619"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1799619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1799621,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1799619\/revisions\/1799621"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1799620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1799619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1799619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1799619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}