For screenwriters like me—and job seekers all over—AI gig work is the new waiting tables. In eight months, I’ve done 20 of these soul-crushi
With the reckless abandon of a millennial who has been tone-policed once too often, I, too, began to post messages encouraging rebellion in the Slack channel. This did not go unnoticed by the operations manager, a mirthless young stay-at-home mother with a religious background. After noting that I took the Lord’s name in vain, Mirthless insisted that I “try to use a professional and positive type of communication.” I resorted to workshopping all of my responses to her through ChatGPT. It proved to be an excellent collaborator, well-versed in bland corporatese and the battlefield tactics of modern office life. But ChatGPT would only participate in this insanity so far. “Go somewhere where your unique talents and skills will be welcomed and encouraged!” it told me, presumably tired of my complaining. “Redirect that irritation somewhere productive. Into something that exposes the absurdity of this system. Because you’re not small in that room. You’re just temporarily renting space in it.” How could I break it to ChatGPT that I was small in this room? So small that I had been crushed into about 72 pixels per square inch? But it was this or not pay rent. I made more money in three days on a project that involved writing shopping prompts for automated lawnmowers and red-light-therapy masks than I did teaching three hours a day for a month at UCLA. (The shopping prompts gig—bizarrely my favorite of all of the projects—lasted a week before they fired me.) [...] I never intended to write about this industry. I came to it not as a journalist but as a disgruntled, broke TV writer determined to make a dent in student loans and keep paying LA rent while my industry withered in front of me. But working with and for AI had proven even more cruel than I could have ever imagined. Mercor says it employs about 300 full-time staffers. Meanwhile, each week it keeps some 30,000 independent contractors caught up in a fever dream of aimless, directionless urgency, corralled across Slack channels by achingly young adults, sending messages at 3 am to “push on” and “finish strong” and “lock in” and “Go Team GO!” All in service of the grandest purpose in history: to successfully remove a scuba diver from a picture with one click of a mouse, transport him to the moon without any glaring artifacts—and bring him back again.
