xAI Wants Elite Writers To Babysit AI. Here's What That Means For Your Career
xAI is hiring "writing specialists" to polish Grok's outputs and source examples for training. Pay: about $40/hour. Requirements: the kind of credits most writers spend a decade building.
For fiction, they want major-house book deals, large sales, stacks of short story credits in top magazines, and/or major awards and reviews. For screenwriting, they're asking for produced features with major distributors, a slate of TV episodes, big streaming numbers, or high-profile awards.
The poetry role ramps it up further: advanced degrees, deep command of traditional forms, awards, and publications. The kicker? A special note that says if your publications are mainly free verse, don't apply. Formalists only.
If you want to see the listings yourself, check the company's careers page: x.ai/careers.
What this tells you about the market
- AI companies still need human taste, structure, and judgment. That's why the bar for credentials is sky-high.
- They're using awards and big-name credits as a proxy for quality and consistency.
- There's a mismatch: top-tier resumes priced like entry-level consulting. That gap is the whole story.
- The actual work is editorial triage and curation: fix awkward AI text and feed the model better examples.
Should you take roles like this?
- Run the math. $40/hour is below what most experienced freelancers charge for high-skill editorial work.
- Define scope in writing: number of outputs per hour, revision rounds, quality standards, and deadlines.
- Negotiate up if you bring awards, major credits, or rare genre expertise. Anchor at your consulting rate, not their posted rate.
- Clarify IP. Who owns edits, prompts, datasets, and style guides you create? Get it in the agreement.
- Ask for byline or portfolio rights where possible. If not, charge more. Invisible work should pay premium rates.
- Insist on paid test projects and a kill fee. Don't donate your process.
Better ways to work with AI without underselling your craft
- Productize: "AI-assisted developmental edit" or "dialogue polish with model-guided passes," priced by scope, not hours.
- Use AI as a private assistant for research, beat sheets, comps, and line-passes-keep the client value on your taste.
- Create reusable assets: genre-specific checklists, style guides, character bibles, and prompts you can license.
- Teach what you do: small cohort workshops on story structure or revision systems. Add an AI module if it helps students ship.
- Consult for publishers, studios, and brands on workflow: where AI helps, where it breaks, and how to set guardrails.
If you're exploring tools to sharpen your process or package your services with AI, these roundups are a useful start: Copywriting AI tools and prompt engineering basics.
If you're curious anyway, protect yourself
- Get a clear contract: scope, deliverables, timeline, rate, rush fees, and kill fee.
- Put data terms in writing: how your edits, prompts, and samples will be stored, used, and attributed.
- Add a clause banning your name or likeness from being used to market the model without consent.
- Ask for staged payments tied to milestones. No net-60 on hourly work.
- Keep a sanitized portfolio version of your process. If that's not allowed, raise your fee.
The irony isn't subtle: the posting signals deep respect for human craft-just not in the pay. And yes, free verse poets were explicitly told to sit this one out. Whether you take gigs like this or build your own lane, price your judgment like it took years to earn-because it did.
Your membership also unlocks:
