(Zero Hedge)—A Bay Area startup called Mercor has hired tens of thousands of white-collar contractors for temporary work, training artificial intelligence to perform the very jobs many of them once held, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.
In effect, these white-collar workers are being paid to accelerate their own obsolescence by feeding and perfecting models for chatbot makers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
What is marketed as short-term income increasingly looks like participation in a system that is not on “team humanity,” but instead is perfecting AI’s ability to hollow out even more white-collar work.
“Welcome to the next gig economy. Instead of driving for Uber or delivering Postmates, a new wave of workers is signing up to school AI. These white-collar contractors review and critique the output of the large language models that power chatbots and other AI tools,” the WSJ story read.
Mercor recruits experts across fields such as medicine, law, finance, engineering, writing, and the arts, with pay ranging from $45 per hour to $250 per hour. These contractors spend weeks or months reviewing and critiquing AI model outputs.
WSJ said that 30,000 contractors were hired in 2025 to work on AI models for some of the largest tech companies, furthering chatbot development.
“Many of the people we work with already see AI as inevitable in their field, but that doesn’t mean humans will run out of meaningful work,” a Mercor spokeswoman told the outlet. “Many of our experts see it as their responsibility to infuse their knowledge and expertise into the models to ensure accurate and thoughtful outcomes.”
WSJ spoke with one of the contractors, Katie Williams, 30, who has been working for Mercor for 6 months …
Williams is now about six months into various projects that have involved watching video clips and writing out captions of everything that’s happening in them, and rating the quality of videos generated by prompts. She has mixed feelings about the work.
“I joked with my friends I’m training AI to take my job someday,” she says.
Co-workers in her Slack channel express similar sentiments, she adds. They don’t feel great about training AI but they feel their job prospects are limited.
And another contractor…
After more than 20 years at the same job as an automotive journalist, Peter Valdes-Dapena was laid off in 2024. He spent months sending out résumés for full-time jobs to no avail. He finds freelance work inconsistent and it doesn’t make up for his past salary. Though he saved for his retirement, he’d rather not start dipping in yet.
One day, Mercor popped up in his LinkedIn feed.
The 61-year-old now spends 20 to 30 hours a week critiquing AI’s attempts at writing news articles. He finds the work challenging and says it’s had the pleasant side effect of improving his own writing.
The nature of the work does produce some internal conflict. Valdes-Dapena says journalists will always exist—he thinks people appreciate ideas and writing from humans—but he worries AI could lead to more job losses.
“I didn’t invent AI and I’m not going to uninvent it,” he says. “If I were to stop doing this, would that stop it? The answer is no.”
Our most recent reporting shows that AI-driven workforce disruptions are rising as AI adoption in corporate America continues to rise.
Latest from Goldman on AI adoption by firms:
AI adoption by firms now stands at 17.4% among US establishments according to the Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey. This reflects a significant increase from the 10% adoption rate last reported in late September, but the sharp increase likely mostly reflects a change in the BTOS AI adoption survey question wording from use of AI for “the production of goods and services” to use of AI for “any business function.” Within industries, information, professional, and education firms continue to lead adoption. Publishing and computing firms reported the largest expected increase in AI adoption over the next six months. We continue to see higher adoption rates among subsectors with greater exposure of work tasks to AI automation. Adoption remains the highest among large firms with 250+ employees, 40% of which expect to be using AI in six months. Recent industry surveys suggest that many adopters are already starting to see positive returns on investment from AI business initiatives.
Labor market impacts (via Goldman):
AI’s impact on the overall labor market still remains limited, although AI employment headwinds are visible in specific occupations like marketing, graphic design, customer service, and especially tech (where the share of overall employment has fallen below its long-run trend). Early signs of headwinds are also emerging among younger workers aged 20-30 in industries with higher AI adoption. Since the last update, AI was mentioned in corporate layoffs affecting 44,319 employees (we expect that AI-driven job displacement will eventually affect 6-7% of all workers following full adoption). At the same time, AI-related job openings now account for 28% of all IT job openings and nearly 5% of Indeed.com job postings contain AI-related keywords in the UK, Canada, and Australia.
We wonder which side these contractors are on: team humanity or the robots?
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