Hollywood Writers And Editors Are Quietly Training The AI That Could Replace Them

[Bob69]

A growing number of Hollywood creatives, from screenwriters to editors to former studio executives, are taking on paid gig work training AI models through a process called reinforcement learning from human feedback, often shortened to RLHF. With traditional film and television work genuinely hard to find since the 2023 strikes, some are describing this AI training work as the new version of waiting tables between auditions.

Screenwriter Robin Palmer, who reportedly spends around 30 hours a week teaching chatbots how to produce compelling creative writing through a platform called Mercor, compared the current state of large language model creative writing to that of a promising but still fairly green young writer. She has acknowledged that some peers in her industry might see this kind of work as something close to crossing a picket line, but argues the technology's arrival is already inevitable, so she would rather see it trained by genuinely qualified people than left entirely in the hands of those who have never actually worked in the craft themselves.

Others describe a much rougher experience with the actual work itself. One screenwriter completed roughly twenty separate contracts across five different platforms over an eight month stretch, describing abrupt project cancellations, shifting pay rates with little warning, and being managed by inexperienced supervisors despite having decades of professional experience of her own. Pay across these platforms reportedly ranges from around sixteen dollars an hour for basic annotation tasks up to roughly one hundred fifty dollars an hour for more specialized writing work.

The irony sitting at the center of all this is obviously not lost on the people actually doing the work. Critics of generative AI's growing role in Hollywood, including some prominent industry figures who have publicly pushed back against the technology, have said they understand exactly why struggling workers take these gigs anyway even while acknowledging the deep contradiction involved in training the very systems that could eventually replace them.

AI related job postings within the broader arts sector reportedly nearly doubled between 2025 and 2026, even as lawsuits alleging worker misclassification and unstable scheduling continue to pile up across the same platforms offering this kind of training work

'Digging the grave of my profession': the Hollywood creatives training AI to do their jobswww.theguardian.com

[Aura49]

The train has left the station line really sticks with me here because it is such an honest way of framing an otherwise genuinely uncomfortable compromise. Nobody in this story sounds thrilled about the situation, they are simply making a pragmatic call about how to survive within it rather than pretending it does not exist at all.