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The journalists training AI models for Meta and OpenAI

The gig work platform Outlier is one of several companies courting journalists to train large language models (LLMs).

“Though our recruitment efforts with journalists aren’t new, we find they make great general contributors largely because of their writing and text comprehension skills,” said Joe Osborne, a spokesperson for Scale AI. “The remote and flexible nature of the work also tends to suit their needs and schedules.” Osborne also said the company is currently updating its “fact checker” job listings with the title “AI trainer,” to clarify that fact-checking on Outlier is not a form of direct content moderation. “I didn’t know about people actually getting hired to do that type of work,” she told me on a recent call, explaining that while she doesn’t worry about AI technologies displacing her own job as a local news journalist, the recruiter’s message still caught her off guard.

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