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-crushing contracts for five different platforms. My name on the platform is ri611. I work as an AI trainer. I assess whether a chatbot's tone is natural or flat, affected or annoying. I identify patterns in pictures of furniture; search the internet for group photos of strangers whom I'll eliminate from the portrait, one by one. I trawl through bizarre videos so I can annotate and time-stamp the barking of a dog, the moment a stranger walks past a window, the precise millisecond a balloon pops. I generate anime sex scenes and decapitate young women, coax LLMs into giving me recipes for bombs made of household items, and generate invites to a reprise of January 6 at the White House, all as part of a red team whose purpose is to test safety precautions and probe weaknesses. I work for companies with names like Mercor and Outlier and Task-ify and Turing and Handshake and Micro1. In my "other" career, I am a Hollywood writer and showrunner. I create prime-time TV, usually featuring a middle-class white lady having the worst day of her life, with some salt-of-the-earth police interference to raise the stakes. You can find my shows on Paramount and Hulu and the BBC.

B rendan Foody is 22 years old and runs a company worth billions. This August, I met the young CEO in a glass conference room overlooking the San Francisco Bay. While his peers are searching for their first jobs, Foody is pursuing a " master plan," as he calls it, to upend the global labor market. His start-up, Mercor, offers an AI-powered hiring platform: Bots weed through résumés, and even conduct interviews. In the next five years, Foody told me, AI could automate 50 percent of the tasks that people do today.

RadVid-19, a program which identifies lung injuries through artificial intelligence, is used at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. RadVid-19, a program which identifies lung injuries through artificial intelligence, is used at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. The tasks resemble those that lawyers, doctors, financial analysts, and management consultants solve for a living. One asks for a diagnosis of a six-year-old patient based on nine pieces of multimedia evidence; another asks for legal advice on a musician's estate; a third calls for a valuation of part of a healthcare technology company. Mercor, which claims to supply "expert data" to every top AI company, says that it spent more than $500,000 to develop 200 tasks that test whether AIs can perform knowledge work with high economic value across law, medicine, finance, and management consulting.