Economic uncertainty is having a devastating impact on the availability of jobs. Last year, the US labor market suffered from slowing wages, layoffs and a significant lack of hiring, leading to Highest unemployment rate in the country in four years Towards the end of 2025.
And while there is debate over whether or not AI is In fact To replace any serious number of jobs, many tech startups are trying to make this a reality. In form of wall street journal reportsA busy San Francisco-based AI company called Mercor is hiring desperate job seekers for a particularly nefarious task: training AI models to one day do the job they used to do.
This is a depressing new reality as concerns grow about jobs being replaced on a large scale by AI. Late last year, computer scientist and AI “godfather” Geoffrey Hinton predicted that AI would continue to “replace many, many jobs” in 2026 as the technology “gets even better.”
An MIT study last year also found that the jobs of more than 20 million Americans could be replaced by AI today, representing $1.2 trillion in wage value.
Paying people who are already struggling to find work in a disastrous job market to train their future replacements is a grotesque new reality in the age of AI, making for quite a bit of dark humor.
“I joked with my friends that I was training AI to take over my job someday,” said Katie Williams, a 30-year-old video editor who has been captioning and rating video clips for Mercor for six months. WSJ.
Automotive journalist Peter Valdes-Dapena, who was fired from his job in 2024, has been critical of AI-generated news articles for Mercor. Irony does not escape him, rather he removes it by rationalizing it.
“I didn’t invent AI and I’m not going to invent it,” he told the newspaper. “If I stop doing this, will that stop it? The answer is no.”
Mercor hired thousands of contractors last year after signing partnerships with AI industry giants including OpenAI and Anthropic. It seems difficult to find job security and stable income in a company Thousands of data labelers are suddenly becoming active For example, last year – only to hire them back for a similar project, but at a significantly lower salary.
As told by a spokesperson WSJContractors need to install time-tracking software on their computers to make sure they aren’t missing any deductions. He said some were also caught using AI to rate AI model outputs.
However, some are skeptical of technology’s ability to wholesale replace human workers. Lawyer Sarah Kubik, who supplements her income by working for Mercor, told the newspaper that the work “has taught me the limits of AI.”
Indeed, researchers have already found that companies may overestimate what AI can do. For example, a study from Carnegie Mellon University found that even the best AI models available at the time failed to complete real-world office tasks 70 percent of the time.
More on Mercor: AI companies are treating their employees like human trash, which could be a sign of things to come for the rest of us
