The Last Job Left Is Training AI. It Pays $16.

About this episode

The episode discusses the implications of AI training jobs in a collapsing creative economy.

Meta cut 8,000 jobs after installing software to learn them. Hollywood writers train AI for $16 an hour. The last paying gig in a collapsing creative economy may be teaching the machine to replace you. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop walk through three labor stories that fuse into one thesis: your job is training the AI that will replace you. Hollywood: working showrunners log into Mercor for what started at $150 an hour and quietly slid to $16, with a 30,000-contractor-per-week annotation army behind the curtain. Ruth Fowler's WIRED essay broke it open. Print: McClatchy's Claude-powered Content Scaling Agent takes one reporter's story, spins it into dozens of city-specific versions for the Sacramento Bee, Miami Herald, and Idaho Statesman, and keeps the original byline on every one. Reporters revolted: putting your name on something you did not write "feels like a lie." Meta: the Model Capability Initiative installs monitoring software on every employee laptop to learn the job. 8,000 layoffs follow. Meta swears it is a coincidence. Plus AI slop and the dead internet, the blind Pepsi challenge, poisoning the well, the potato emoji shibboleth, Van Halen's green M&Ms, robot dog…

People in this episode

Hosts: Hunter Powers, Daniel Bishop

Topics covered

• AI training
• job market
• creative economy
• media
• technology
• automation

Keywords

• AI
• job training
• Hollywood
• Meta
• automation
• creative economy
• media layoffs
• reporting

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Meta, Hollywood, WIRED, McClatchy, Sacramento Bee, Miami Herald, Idaho Statesman

Products: Claude-powered Content Scaling Agent

Places: Meta, California

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