In 2023, concerns over the rise of generative AI animated the writers’ and actors’ strikes, with many rank-and-file workers fearful that it could put wide swaths of the entertainment industry out of work. Three years later, with those concerns still alive and well, some Hollywood workers have been moonlighting in AI training, working to help improve the tech, anyway.
As Hollywood adapts to the technology — particular corners of the business running towards it, others away — a smattering of creatives have begun to go public with their time in the world of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). In May writer Ruth Fowler (Little Disasters, Rules of the Game) published a personal essay for Wired about her own experience with AI training jobs, a field she says she resorted to as entertainment work dried up and she needed money to pay rent and buy groceries. The same month screenwriter Robin Palmer, who has written TV movies for Disney Channel and Hallmark, spoke with CBS News about working in AI training, even as she admitted that some in her field might compare it to crossing the picket line.
Editor Gabe Sena is another entertainment worker whose side hustle is helping to fine-tune AI models. “I’m mid-career and I don’t want to be a dinosaur in my field,” he explains to The Hollywood Reporter. “This is a thing that people are fearful of, that seems like a black box to a lot of people who aren’t in the tech industry. And so it made more sense to me to try to immerse myself in it as opposed to just going, ‘I don’t like that it’s new.’”
