AI training jobs are expanding as businesses use specialists to improve systems such as ChatGPT and Claude, but economists and technology leaders are warning that the wider consequences could include substantial job losses.
Music producer Robbie Hiser is among more than 100,000 freelancers recruited by Mercor to teach artificial intelligence about subjects ranging from finance to poetry. The work can pay between 20 and 200 US dollars an hour, and AI training is now the fourth-fastest-growing job category on LinkedIn in the United States.
Hiser does not believe he is helping to make his own profession redundant. He argues that creative work, including songwriting, still depends on human experience.
“AI doesn’t have any life experience to pull from,” he said. “An AI never had a girlfriend break up with it.”
Mercor chief executive Brendan Foody views the shift as a natural evolution of work. He says artificial intelligence could take over dull and repetitive duties, allowing people to spend more time on meaningful tasks.
AI training jobs and the changing workplace
One example comes from the Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease law firm in Columbus, Ohio, which worked with Stanford University’s Liftlab to create AI personas based on the experience and philosophy of senior lawyers.
The systems can offer feedback on documents from the perspective of individual partners, according to trial lawyer Kim Herlihy. But she said they were intended to support lawyers rather than replace them.
“AI is never going to walk into the courtroom and give an opening statement to the jury,” she said. “But it helps us have additional tools to use as we prepare that opening statement.”
Herlihy said the technology could not replicate the human relationship at the heart of legal work.
“AI cannot take the place of what’s a fundamentally human business,” she said. “You call your lawyer because you want to look in their eye and say, ‘What should I do about this issue?’”
Yet public concern about employment is growing. Almost three-quarters of Americans now fear that artificial intelligence will threaten their jobs, while research from the McKinsey Global Institute has suggested that 11 million US workers could be pushed into new careers by 2035.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu said the pace of change was unlike previous technological upheavals, with automation advancing across several sectors at once.
“What we are living through with AI is unprecedented,” he said. “The first phase of the Industrial Revolution took 80 years. Today it’s taking place in one or two years and it’s taking place across many different sectors at the same time.”
Acemoglu warned that, in the worst-case scenario, unemployment could triple over the next decade if the United States continued on its current path. Although he acknowledged that artificial intelligence would create work training systems, he said those roles would be insufficient to offset the number of jobs displaced.
“The number of people they’re employing in these positions is small relative to the number of people who will be replaced,” he said.
Young workers among those most exposed
Research from Stanford indicates that hiring has fallen for young people in jobs particularly exposed to artificial intelligence, including software development. US Census research has also found declines in hiring and wages among recent graduates from majors vulnerable to the technology.
Clara Shih, who previously led major artificial intelligence divisions at Salesforce and Meta, said tasks traditionally assigned to junior employees, such as market research and preparing an initial memo, could now be handled effectively by AI.
She left her technology job in January to establish a non-profit aimed at helping young workers navigate the changing economy. Shih said the effects would extend beyond pay and employment.
“It’s never just about the jobs. It’s people’s sense of self-worth. It’s the fracturing of communities,” she said.
Acemoglu said the answer was not to reject technology, but to shape how it was introduced. Companies could develop systems designed to make workers more effective rather than expendable, while governments could use tax policy to encourage the employment of people.
“It should move us into thinking about what we can do because there is a lot we can do,” he said. “Because the future is so uncertain, because the future is so much subject to our choice and agency, it is all the more important that we have this discussion.”
