Three years after the 2023 strikes raised alarms about AI replacing entertainment workers, some of those same workers are now training the technology that worries them. As film and TV jobs grow harder to find, writers, editors, and executives across Hollywood are quietly taking gig work just to pay the bills. It’s called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), and it involves fine-tuning AI models.
Hollywood workers explain why they’re training AI models
According to The Hollywood Reporter, editor Gabe Sena turned to AI training after a stretch of unemployment, saying he wanted to understand the technology rather than simply fear it. Former HBO development executive Steven Woolworth had a similar motivation, calling the work a way to stay informed rather than bury his head in the sand while job hunting proved fruitless for over a year.
Both found gigs through a recruiting platform called Mercor, which pairs domain experts with AI companies needing human feedback. This trend lines up with a broader industry pattern, with Amazon also turning to AI to cut film and TV production costs through its own dedicated studio.
What the work actually looks like once you’re in it
Screenwriter Ruth Fowler described a far rougher experience in her own essay for Wired, detailing eight months and twenty contracts across five different platforms. The pay ranges from $16/hour for entry-level annotation work up to $150/hour for specialized writing tasks. She described abrupt project cancellations, shifting pay rates, and young, inexperienced managers overseeing workers decades into their careers.
A growing AI industry built on real legal and ethical tension
RLHF work has expanded rapidly regardless, with AI-related job postings within the arts nearly doubling between 2025 and 2026, even as lawsuits pile up alleging worker misclassification and unstable scheduling across the industry. Even Martin Scorsese has officially joined the AI camp, a sign of how far the acceptance of these tools has spread across the industry.
Critics of generative AI in Hollywood, like Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, say they understand why struggling workers take these gigs despite the contradictions involved. For many in Hollywood right now, training the machine has become less about curiosity and more about simply making rent.
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