Amid a historic slump in entertainment employment, award-winning Hollywood writers, directors and producers are taking on temporary work that many describe with grim humor: training the artificial intelligence systems expected to replace them.

According to a report by The Guardian published Saturday, experienced creatives are being paid between $12 and $200 an hour to teach AI models the intricacies of screenwriting, production scheduling and other film and television crafts. The assignments flow through a booming crop of AI training agencies that hold contracts with some of the biggest names in artificial intelligence, including Anthropic and OpenAI. For more context on this story, see our ongoing more AI stories.

"It's very production specific," Ruth Fowler, a screenwriter and producer in Los Angeles, told The Guardian. "It's teaching it how to take our jobs."

What the Training Work Actually Involves

Fowler wrote and created "Rules of the Game," a BBC One drama starring Maxine Peake, and co-wrote the screenplay for "Little Disasters," a Paramount+ series starring Diane Kruger. She described highly specialized assignments that mirror the day-to-day work of working film and TV professionals.

In one project, she had to train an AI to devise a detailed schedule for a hypothetical two-day shoot — identifying necessary filming permits, potential location hazards, daylight conditions for photography, lists of personnel per shot, and cast needs such as child protection. The system had to base its plan on source documents including emails, a shooting script and other production materials. In another case, she trained an AI to assemble a pitch deck for film and TV ideas — the kind of work normally done by a production executive.

She started the work, she said, "because I was thinking: wow, I'm always broke."

"I think production is down by 35% or something insane," Fowler said. "So everybody was like: 'what do we do?'"

Another creative, an LA-based documentary director who requested anonymity, took a job teaching an AI to accurately transcribe chaotic video footage. He reviewed recordings of a Little League baseball game in which voices were muddled by music and crowd noise, teaching the system to tease apart overlapping sounds. He also had to create a visual guide to each speaker and characterize accents — a task that sparked unease among the freelance workers involved.

"I would not have embarked on this work if I did not have a realistic and perhaps a bit fatalistic understanding of how the world is working," he told The Guardian. "This is simply a thing that will be with us in the future and no amount of abstaining will prevent [it]. I describe to friends [that] I was essentially handed a shovel and asked to dig the grave of my profession."

A Jobs Slump Measured in the Data

The trend is unfolding against a backdrop of steep, measurable decline in Hollywood employment. According to figures cited by The Guardian:

  • Shoot days in Los Angeles fell 48% between 2021 and 2025, according to FilmLA Research, as the pandemic, the writers' strike and reduced streaming investment took their toll.
  • Jobs in US motion picture and sound recording industries declined 28%, from 450,000 in July 2022 — the peak of the post-pandemic recovery — to 326,000 in May 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
  • An April analysis from Boston Consulting Group estimated that 10% to 15% of jobs across the wider US economy could be eliminated by AI, with more than half of all roles reshaped by the technology.

AI is already moving into the creative pipeline itself. Netflix revealed this month that it used AI in 300 of its 1,000 titles in 2026, and directors including Ron Howard are beginning to embrace the technology — Howard is set to release an AI-enabled animated documentary feature about prisoners of war in Vietnam.

The Agencies Brokering the Work

The Guardian identified Mercor, Micro1 and Handshake as three of the most prominent AI training companies connecting domain experts with model developers. The pay can be substantial by gig-work standards: Micro1 was seeking producers with "demonstrated mastery in film, television, digital, or live event production" and more than five years of credited project experience to design evaluation tasks simulating realistic production-management scenarios — budget reconciliation, scheduling adjustments, and vendor or crew coordination — at rates of up to $85 an hour.

The agencies' client lists include the largest AI labs, which rely on human experts to grade, correct and enrich model outputs — work that has quietly become one of the fastest-growing categories of freelance employment in the AI economy.

Not Everyone Is Despairing

Some creatives view the trend with equanimity. Jody Wheeler, a 56-year-old screenwriter who has taught at the University of Southern California and has himself taken AI training work, points to the technology's shortcomings.

While the models are good at churning out ideas, "the machines are not going to be generating Oscar-winning scripts any time soon," he told The Guardian.

"You can see this as kind of giving people a shovel to bury themselves with," Wheeler said. "It can also be the case that you're giving people a shovel to help them unearth stuff that they wouldn't have been able to do themselves before."

Younger filmmakers, meanwhile, are using AI as a production tool rather than treating it purely as a threat. Zack London, who goes by the name Gossip Goblin, built an audience of hundreds of millions of views for his AI-produced science fiction shorts online and is due to release a feature film in cinemas later this year.

The Broader Reckoning

The Hollywood experience is an early, vivid case study of a question now rippling through white-collar professions: what happens when the most efficient way for experts to earn money during a downturn is to transfer their expertise into systems that reduce demand for experts?

The screenwriters and directors training AI models are not doing so out of enthusiasm — they are doing it because, as Fowler put it, everybody was asking "what do we do?" The answer, for now, is that the same skills that once commanded studio paychecks are being broken down into hourly training tasks, priced between $12 and $200.

Whether those tasks represent a bridge to new kinds of creative work or, as one director put it, a shovel for digging a profession's grave, will depend on how quickly AI-generated content improves — and on how audiences and studios decide to value the human version.

For ongoing coverage of AI's impact on creative industries and the labor market, follow the latest developments at AI Buzz Wire.

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