Hollywood creatives are taking gig work to train AI models to replicate their skills, offsetting tightening earnings in a trend one participant compared to being "handed a shovel and asked to dig the grave of my profession." Experienced and award-winning writers, directors, and producers are being paid from $12 to $200 an hour to teach AI systems the intricacies of their jobs, from writing a screenplay to devising a shooting schedule.
With feelings ranging from fatalism to guilt, the creatives have signed up with training agencies that hold contracts with major AI companies including Anthropic and OpenAI. While they wait for entertainment industry work, they give notes on the AI systems' attempts to do the tasks they would hope to be paid for themselves. The work comes amid a slump in the motion picture and sound recording industries, where AI is starting to take roles from actors, editors, and special effects artists. Netflix this month revealed it used AI in 300 of its 1,000 titles in 2026, and directors including Ron Howard are starting to embrace the technology.
Teaching AI to take their jobs
"It's very production specific," said Ruth Fowler, a screenwriter and producer in Los Angeles. "It's teaching it how to take our jobs."
Fowler wrote and created Rules of the Game, a BBC One drama starring Maxine Peake, and co-wrote the screenplay for Little Disasters, a series for Paramount Plus starring Diane Kruger. But she started training AIs "because I was thinking: wow, I'm always broke."
"I think production is down by 35% or something insane," she told the Guardian. "So everybody was more than a little concerned."
She trained an AI to devise a detailed schedule for a hypothetical two-day shoot, including identifying necessary filming permits, potential location hazards, daylight conditions for photography, lists of personnel per shot, and cast needs such as child protection. In another case, she trained an AI how to put together a pitch deck for film and TV ideas - the kind of work a production executive would do.
Another creative, an LA documentary director, took a job teaching an AI how to accurately transcribe video footage. He reviewed recordings of a Little League baseball game where voices were muddled by music and crowd noise, teaching the system to tease out overlapping sounds. He also had to create a visual note for each speaker and characterize accents, which sparked concern among the other workers.
"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 said, requesting anonymity. "This is simply a thing that will be in the future and no amount of abstaining will prevent [it]. I describe it to friends [as] I was essentially handed a shovel and asked to dig the grave of my profession."
The numbers behind the slump
Job opportunities for Hollywood workers have dwindled. Shoot days in LA fell 48% between 2021 and 2025, according to FilmLA Research, as the consequences of the pandemic, the writers' strike, and the decline in investment by streaming companies took hold. Across the US, jobs in motion picture and sound recording industries dropped 28% from a peak of 450,000 in July 2022 to 326,000 in May 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Across the US economy overall, 10% to 15% of jobs could be eliminated by AI and more than half of roles reshaped by the technology, according to an April analysis from Boston Consulting Group. Driverless taxis, software coding, and AI translation are prominent early examples.
Mercor, Micro1, and Handshake are three prominent AI training companies. Micro1 was seeking producers with "demonstrated mastery in film, television, digital, or live event production" and more than five years of credited experience to "design and author evaluation tasks that simulate realistic production-management scenarios, such as budget reconciliation, scheduling adjustments, and vendor or crew coordination." Pay is up to $85 an hour.
Mixed views from the trenches
Jody Wheeler, a 56-year-old screenwriter who has taught at the University of Southern California and has taken AI training work, was skeptical, having seen what he views as the technology's limitations. While the AI models are good at thinking up ideas, "the machines are not going to be generating Oscar-winning scripts any time soon."
"You can see this as a kind of giving people a shovel to bury themselves with," he explained. "You can also see this as giving people a shovel to help them unearth something that they couldn't have gotten to before."
Younger filmmakers have been turning to AI to produce films and series that wouldn't have otherwise received funding. Zack London, who goes by the name Gossip Goblin, is due to release a feature film with big cosmetics later this year, having built up hundreds of millions of viewers for his AI-produced science fiction shorts online.
Another writer with credits on TV series for Amazon, HBO, NBC, and Lionsgate, who asked not to be named, said she had started training AIs to write scripts after commissions did not spread out from the 2023 writers' strike. She also assesses AI-written podcasts, novels, and lectures. "It's keeping me afloat without letting me have to stress." She has noticed the AI getting significantly better, but "no closer to approximating human emotion … there's no nuance." AI could write an episode of CSI, but not Severance or Succession, she said.
"I don't worry about it replacing real artists," she said. "Is it gonna level out the guys who never should have been doing this in the first place? Yes."
She acknowledged the ethical tension: "Looking back a bit, I was starting to think: 'Oh god, I maybe should not be doing this. Maybe we are going to get to a place where this is going to eventually put people out of work.' But at the end of the day, having money in the bank advances."
Why this matters for creatives
For writers, directors, and producers facing a shrinking market, AI training work offers a stopgap - but it comes with a clear trade-off. The skills being taught today are the same ones studios are beginning to automate, and the pay range of $12 to $200 an hour reflects how unevenly the work is distributed. Creatives who want to stay ahead of this shift should understand how these systems are being built and where their limitations remain. The writers interviewed for this story consistently said AI cannot capture human emotion or nuance - but it can handle structure, scheduling, and formulaic content. Those are the tasks most at risk. For those looking to adapt, AI for Creatives courses and certifications offer a way to learn the technology on your own terms, and AI for Scriptwriters training addresses the specific craft of writing with these tools. The question isn't whether AI will be part of production - it's whether the people who understand both the craft and the technology will be the ones using it.
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