The LinkedIn post seemed like yet another scam job offer, but Katya was desperate enough to click. After college, she’d struggled to make a living as a freelance journalist, gone to grad school, then pivoted to what she hoped would be a more stable career in content marketing — only to find AI had automated much of the work. This company was called Crossing Hurdles, and it promised copywriting jobs starting at $45 per hour. Katya clicked and was taken to a page for another company, called Mercor, where she was instructed to interview on-camera with an AI named Melvin. “It just seemed like the sketchiest thing in the world,” Katya says. She closed the tab. But a few weeks later, still unemployed, she got a message inviting her to apply to Mercor. This time, she looked up the company. Mercor, it seemed, sold data to train AI, and she was being recruited to create that data. “My job is gone because of ChatGPT, and I was being invited to train the model to do the worst version of it imagin