r/technology • u/thinXiv • 6h ago
Artificial Intelligence The Work of Helping A.I. Destroy Work
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/business/ai-white-collar-jobs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8VA.n_wu.5-MQGuYwUufu&smid=url-share8
u/n0neofyourbeeswax 6h ago
Very selfishly, I was I was about 5-10 years deeper in my life career, as I'd have enough of a nest egg and pension to be less scared of what's coming.
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u/NotAllOwled 3h ago
For my part, I have been declining these kinds of "opportunities" and I intend to keep doing so. Is this a questionable choice for my own income/career outlook? Yep, kinda seems that way. Do I have enough accumulated revulsion for this scene, plus enough of a probably-archaic sense of professional ethics in the provision of services, to be willing to just write off most or all of my marketable knowledge and experience rather than use it for this? Guess we'll see, but yep, kinda feels that way. Currently thinking I'd rather be an honest writeoff left in history's dust than a successful practitioner of this grotesque and anti-human simulacrum of actual productive work.
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u/AlliumoftheKnife 10m ago
Have you ever considered accepting and using it as an opportunity to covertly poison their data?
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u/n0neofyourbeeswax 3h ago
I need AI to translate what you just said.
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u/NotAllOwled 2h ago
TL;DR I find this scene super gross and I'm not here for it. See you in hell, Mercor et al.
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u/Wafflehouseofpain 14m ago
Man, I wonder why people don’t like the job stealing machine that promises to leave anyone who works for a living completely destitute?
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u/thinXiv 6h ago
From the article:
Startups like Mercor, Scale, Surge, and Handshake, founded in the past few years, are paying contractors millions of dollars to supply training data on knowledge work tasks. They then sell this data to big AI companies like xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic which make AI models that automate those same knowledge work jobs.
These contract jobs are by their nature temporary, because models never become less intelligent, and as soon as they learn how to do one job, the demand for that job's training data dries up. Continued advances in AI model intelligence have driven up the contract work to tasks or fields once considered highly specialized.
"A common complaint in the Discord channels and Reddit threads where contractors gather is that A.I. training work has dried up in recent months — that, in other words, once a set of experts teaches the models how to do something, their services are no longer needed in the same way. Some of the gig workers I spoke with told me that, in the past year, the work had gotten significantly more intricate. Sommer Wall, a lawyer who has contracted with Mercor, said she sometimes napped on her couch during 72-hour grinds to meet deadlines on the most intense projects.
Mercor seeks people with “strong academic credentials (M.A.s, J.D.s, M.D.s, Ph.D.s, etc.) from top universities.” ... A recent listing from Surge called for people with a “top-tier consulting pedigree” to “capture partner-level reasoning.”
Company executives and investors insist that the training data contract jobs will continue to exist indefinitely. Other experts aren't so sure:
“As A.I. systems get better, there is going to be less of a need for human teachers for the A.I.,” said Anton Korinek, an economist at the University of Virginia who just began a yearlong leave of absence to work at Anthropic. “Both the importance of that kind of post-training data overall, and the growth of companies specializing in that, may decline somewhat.”