Hollywood creatives are taking gig activity to train AI models to replicate their skills successful a bid to offset tightening net successful a inclination 1 compared to being “handed a shovel and asked to excavation the sedate of my profession”.
Experienced and award-winning writers, board and producers are being paid from $12 to $200 an hr to thatch AI models the intricacies of their jobs, from penning a screenplay to devising a shooting schedule.
With feelings ranging from fatalism to guilt, the creatives person signed up pinch immoderate of the booming training agencies, which person contracts pinch the biggest AI companies including Anthropic and OpenAI, to walk connected hard-won quality skills successful industries specified arsenic finance, health, rule and societal work.
While they hold for intermezo manufacture work, they springiness notes connected the AI systems’ attempts to do the tasks they would dream to beryllium paid for themselves. It comes amid a slump successful jobs successful the mobility image and sound signaling industries, wherever AI is starting to return roles from actors, editors and typical effects artists. Netflix this period revealed it utilized AI successful 300 of its 1,000 titles successful 2026, and board including Ron Howard are starting to embrace the technology.
“It’s very accumulation specific,” said Ruth Fowler, a screenwriter and shaper successful Los Angeles. “It’s school it really to return our jobs.”
Fowler wrote and created Rules of the Game, a BBC One play starring Maxine Peake, and co-wrote the screenplay for Little Disasters, a bid for Paramount Plus starring Diane Kruger. But she started training AIs “because I was thinking: wow, I’m ever broke”.
“I deliberation accumulation is down by 35% aliases thing insane,” she told the Guardian. “So everybody was like: ‘what do we do?’”
She had to train an AI to devise a elaborate schedule for a hypothetical two-day shoot, including identifying basal filming permits, imaginable location hazards, daylight conditions for photography, lists of unit per changeable and formed needs specified arsenic kid protection. She would train the AI to guidelines the scheme connected documents including emails, a shooting book and different accumulation materials. In different case, she trained an AI really to put together a transportation platform for movie and TV ideas – the benignant of activity a accumulation executive would do.
Another creative, an LA documentary director, took a occupation school an AI really to accurately transcribe video footage. He reviewed recordings of a Little League shot crippled wherever the voices were muddled by euphony and crowd sound to thatch it to tease retired overlapping sounds. He besides had to create a ocular guideline to each speaker (for example: blond female pinch a buttoned-down garment pinch a golden necklace) and characterise accents, specified arsenic English, Scottish, African American aliases Asian – which sparked interest among the freelance workers.
“I would not person embarked connected this activity if I did not person a realistic and possibly a spot fatalistic knowing of really the world is working,” he said, requesting anonymity. “This is simply a point that will beryllium pinch america successful the early and nary magnitude of abstaining will forestall [it].
“I picture to friends [that] I was fundamentally handed a shovel and asked to excavation the sedate of my profession.”
Job opportunities for Hollywood workers person dwindled. Shoot days successful LA fell 48% betwixt 2021 and 2025, according to FilmLA Research, arsenic the consequences of the pandemic, the writers’ onslaught and little finance by the streaming companies took a toll. Across the US, jobs successful mobility image and sound signaling industries declined 28% from 450,000 successful July 2022, the highest of the post-pandemic recovery, to 326,000 successful May 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Across the wider US economy, 10% to 15% of jobs successful the US could beryllium eliminated by AI and much than half of roles reshaped by the exertion – pinch driverless taxis, package coding and AI translator among salient examples, according to an April study from Boston Consulting Group.
Mercor, Micro1 and Handshake are 3 of the salient AI training companies. Micro1 was this week seeking producers pinch “demonstrated mastery successful film, television, digital, aliases unrecorded arena production” and much than 5 years of credited task acquisition to “design and writer information tasks that simulate realistic production-management scenarios, specified arsenic fund reconciliation, scheduling adjustments, and vendor aliases unit coordination”. Pay is up to $85 an hour.
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Jody Wheeler, a 56-year-old screenwriter who has taught astatine the University of Southern California and has taken AI training work, was sanguine, having seen what he believes are the technology’s shortcomings. While the AI models are bully astatine churning retired ideas, he said, “the machines are not going to beryllium generating Oscar-winning scripts immoderate clip soon”.
“You tin spot this arsenic benignant of giving group a shovel to hide themselves with,” he said. “It tin besides beryllium the lawsuit that you’re giving group a shovel to thief them unearth worldly that they wouldn’t person been capable to do themselves before.”
Younger filmmakers person been turning to AI to nutrient films and bid that wouldn’t person different received funding. For example, Zack London, who goes by the sanction Gossip Goblin, is owed to merchandise a characteristic movie successful cinemas later this year, having built up hundreds of millions of views for his AI-produced subject fabrication shorts online.
Another writer pinch credits connected TV bid for Amazon, HBO, NBC and Lionsgate, who asked not to beryllium named, said she had started training AIs to constitute scripts aft commissions did not rebound from the 2023 writers’ strike. She besides assesses AI-written podcasts, novels and lectures: “It’s keeping maine afloat without letting maine person to stress.” She has noticed the AI getting importantly better, but “no person to approximating quality emotion … there’s nary nuance”. AI could constitute an section of CSI, but not Severance aliases Succession, she said.
“I don’t interest astir it replacing existent artists,” she said. “Is it gonna level retired the guys who ne'er should person been doing this successful the first place? Yes.”
“A mates of months ago, I was starting to think: ‘Oh god, I possibly should not beryllium doing this. Maybe we are going to a spot wherever this is going to yet put group retired of work.’ But astatine the extremity of the day, having money successful the slope won.”
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