Annotator

"I never intended to write about this industry. I came to it not as a journalist but as a disgruntled, broke TV writer determined to make a dent in student loans and keep paying LA rent while my industry withered in front of me. But working with and for AI had proven even more cruel than I could have ever imagined.

"I no longer knew what the Golden Task of my own life might look like. When given the chance to respond to details from this article, Mercor said that it strives to give workers as much notice as possible when these projects change —a sentiment roughly echoed by other companies. 

"Mercor says it employs about 300 full-time staffers. Meanwhile, each week it keeps some 30,000 independent contractors caught up in a fever dream of aimless, directionless urgency, corralled across Slack channels by achingly young adults, sending messages at 3 am to push on and finish strong and lock in and Go Team GO! All in service of the grandest purpose in history: to successfully remove a scuba diver from a picture with one click of a mouse, transport him to the moon without any glaring artifacts —and bring him back again.

"Between February and April 2026, I was hired and fired on seven different projects over four different platforms. The dismissals were always abrupt, shocking. One moment I would be typing rubrics into an Airtable, waiting in line on a 24-hour Zoom to talk through a task with a reviewer. The next, the UI would vanish. The Slack channel would disappear. The Google docs would lock me out. No message. No warning. No explanation.

"The next generations of team leaders won’t know our specific talents or our unique skills, but they will know the Average Time it takes us to annotate a grainy video uploaded without the owner’s consent into a vast catalog of other possibly stolen videos."