"My job is gone because of ChatGPT, and I was being invited to train the model to do the worst version of it imaginable. The idea depressed her. But her financial situation was increasingly dire, and she had to find a new place to live in a hurry, so she turned on her webcam and said hello to Melvin."
"Mercor, it seemed, sold data to train AI, and she was being recruited to create that data. After college, she'd struggled to make a living as a freelance journalist, gone to grad school, then pivoted to what she hoped would be a more stable career in content marketing - only to find AI had automated much of the work."
Katya, a struggling freelance journalist turned content marketer, discovers her career has been disrupted by AI automation. Desperate for income and facing housing insecurity, she responds to a job posting from Crossing Hurdles offering copywriting work. The application redirects her to Mercor, a company that recruits workers to create training data for AI models through interviews with an AI named Melvin. Despite initial skepticism about the legitimacy and ethical implications of training the very technology that displaced her, financial pressure compels her to participate. She completes an on-camera interview with Melvin, receives a job offer, and agrees to install monitoring software on her computer to begin generating AI training data alongside hundreds of other workers.
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