An LA documentary director described the job in one image: being handed a shovel and told to dig the grave of his own profession.
He took the work anyway. He's one of a growing number of experienced Hollywood writers, directors and producers taking gig work from AI training agencies, paid $12 to $200 an hour to teach AI models the exact skills that used to be their careers.
Handed a Shovel
The tasks are specific and often uncomfortable in their precision. Screenwriter and producer Ruth Fowler, whose credits include the BBC One drama Rules of the Game and Paramount Plus's Little Disasters, trained an AI to build a full two-day shoot schedule, permits, location hazards, daylight conditions, cast and crew needs, child protection requirements included.
"It's teaching it how to take our jobs," Fowler said.
The anonymous documentary director's assignment was transcription work, teasing dialogue out of a Little League baseball game recording muddled by crowd noise and music. Part of the job required building visual descriptions of each speaker and characterizing accents, a detail that reportedly raised concern among some of the freelance workers involved.
"I was essentially handed a shovel and asked to dig the grave of my profession," he said, requesting anonymity.
The Industry Collapse Behind It
The gig work exists because the traditional work largely doesn't anymore. Shoot days in Los Angeles fell 48% between 2021 and 2025, according to FilmLA Research.
Nationally, motion picture and sound recording industry jobs dropped 28%, from 450,000 in July 2022 to 326,000 in May 2026, per Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Netflix disclosed using AI in 300 of its 1,000 titles released in 2026.
Training agencies including Mercor, Micro1 and Handshake now hold contracts with major AI labs, including Anthropic and OpenAI, to source exactly this kind of specialized human expertise, not just for entertainment but across finance, health, law and social work as well.
Not Everyone Sees It the Same Way
The reactions among the workers themselves range widely. Jody Wheeler, a screenwriter who has taught at USC, thinks the fear is overstated for now.
"The machines are not going to be generating Oscar-winning scripts any time soon," Wheeler said.
He reframes the shovel metaphor entirely. "You're giving people a shovel to help them unearth stuff that they wouldn't have been able to do themselves before," he said.
A television writer with credits on shows for Amazon, HBO, NBC and Lionsgate described a similar shift in her own thinking. She started training AI models after work didn't rebound following the 2023 writers' strike, and now also evaluates AI-written podcasts and novels.
She's watched the technology improve steadily, but says it still can't replicate real emotional nuance, the difference between AI writing a competent episode of a procedural and something like Succession. Money settled the question for her regardless.
"A couple of months ago, I was starting to think, oh god, I maybe should not be doing this," she said. "But at the end of the day, having money in the bank won."
What This Means for Miami
Miami's own production and creative economy, already navigating the AI copyright fights MAIN has covered involving ByteDance and the Motion Picture Association, faces the same underlying pressure playing out in Los Angeles: fewer traditional production jobs, and a growing market for creative professionals willing to teach AI systems their own expertise instead.
That tension isn't unique to entertainment. It's the same dynamic already reshaping tech careers in the Bay Area, where laid-off workers are building AI-native livelihoods rather than waiting for their old jobs to come back. For Miami's production companies, ad agencies and creative freelancers, the AI training economy is a real, current source of income, not a hypothetical future one, and it comes with the same complicated math the Hollywood workers in this story are already living through.