{"id":8004,"date":"2026-01-12T19:12:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T19:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/mercor-unemployed-teach-ai\/"},"modified":"2026-01-12T19:12:00","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T19:12:00","slug":"mercor-unemployed-teach-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/mercor-unemployed-teach-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Startup Hiring Desperate Unemployed People to Teach AI to Do Their Old Jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Economic uncertainty is continuing to have devastating effects on the availability of jobs. Last year, the US labor market reeled from slowing wages, layoffs, and a notable lack of hiring, leading to the highest unemployment rate in the country in four years<\/a> toward the end of 2025.<\/p>\n

And while debate swirls<\/a> about whether AI is actually<\/em> replacing jobs in any serious numbers, many tech startups are trying to make it a reality. As the Wall Street Journal<\/em> reports<\/a>, a buzzy San Francisco-based AI company called Mercor is hiring desperate job-seekers for a particularly ghoulish task: training AI models to one day do the work they used to do.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a depressing new reality as concerns over AI replacing jobs en masse continue to grow. Late last year, computer scientist and AI \u201cgodfather\u201d Geoffrey Hinton predicted<\/a> that AI would continue to \u201creplace many, many jobs\u201d in 2026 as the tech \u201cgets even better.\u201d<\/p>\n

An MIT study also found last year<\/a> that more than 20 million Americans\u2019 work can be replaced with today\u2019s AI, representing $1.2 trillion in wage value.<\/p>\n

Paying those who are already struggling to find work in a disastrous job market to train their future replacements is a twisted new reality in the age of AI, leading to plenty of dark humor.<\/p>\n

\u201cI joked with my friends I\u2019m training AI to take my job someday,\u201d 30-year-old video editor Katie Williams, who has been captioning and rating video clips for Mercor for six months, told the WSJ<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Automotive journalist Peter Valdes-Dapena, who was laid off in 2024, has been critiquing AI-generated news articles for Mercor. The irony doesn\u2019t escape him, but he rationalizes it away.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t invent AI and I\u2019m not going to uninvent it,\u201d he told the newspaper. \u201cIf I were to stop doing this, would that stop it? The answer is no.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mercor hired tens of thousands of contractors last year after signing partnerships with AI industry stalwarts including OpenAI and Anthropic. Job security and a stable income appear to be hard to come by, with the company suddenly firing thousands of data labelers<\/a> last year, for instance \u2014 only to hire them back on for a similar project, but for considerably less pay<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As a spokeswoman told the WSJ<\/em>, contractors need to install time-tracking software on their computers to make sure they aren\u2019t cutting corners. She said that some were even caught using AI to rate AI model outputs. <\/p>\n

Some, however, remain skeptical of the tech\u2019s ability to replace human workers wholesale. Lawyer Sara Kubik, who has been supplementing her income by working for Mercor, told the newspaper that the work has \u201ctaught me the limitations of AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, researchers have already found that companies may be massively overestimating what AI can do. For instance, a Carnegie Mellon University study found that even the best AI models available at the time failed to complete<\/a>\u00a0real-world office tasks<\/a>\u00a070 percent of the time.<\/p>\n

More on Mercor:<\/strong> AI Companies Are Treating Their Workers Like Human Garbage, Which May Be a Sign of Things to Come for the Rest of Us<\/span><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Tech Startup Hiring Desperate Unemployed People to Teach AI to Do Their Old Jobs<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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