I Trained the AI That’s Coming for My Job. Then I Became It.

The real threat isn’t that AI will write like us. It’s that we’ll start acting like machines.

Something I’d never seen in my 65 years: a job listing for creative writers. On LinkedIn, hidden among the postings for SEO content creators and B2B strategists, this listing solicited writers of short stories, creative nonfiction, and screenplays, as well as novelists, playwrights, and poets. There was a catch, though. The employer was an AI company, and applicants needed to be award-winning authors or MFA graduates with credits in magazines like The New Yorker or The Atlantic. Apparently, the company was looking to hire Joyce Carol Oates.

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It was probably for the best that my lone creative writing credit, a short story in an obscure literary journal, meant I was woefully underqualified. Did I really want to work with a platform engineering the human element out of hiring, while supplying the very talent needed to train the large language models (LLMs) that might one day make people like me obsolete?

For $50 an hour? Absolutely. I accepted the position immediately when a recruiter reached out. Within days, as part of a team of over 400 writers, I was an AI tutor teaching an LLM owned by an infamous billionaire to mimic human creativity.

The work was oddly exhilarating. I threw out ideas for novels that the platform turned into 22-chapter outlines. I wrote an obituary for my 1986 Honda Prelude, Jolly, murdered by a speeding Range Rover on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. I turned my sole published short story, “Stella Artois Comes in Cans,” into a one-act play.

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The other writers shared my delight. Similarly graying, experienced, and ambivalent about helping AI drive creative workers toward extinction, they blew up our #tutors Slack channel with self-congratulatory glee over this opportunity to be paid creative writers. Together, we suffered through the semiweekly Zoom meetings where people at least three decades younger than us, clad in company logo tees and baseball caps, delivered constantly changing criteria for our jobs. We worked fast, under constant evaluation, and were just as quickly replaced. I told my friends I was a new kind of factory worker, only the factory was my home office, and the hourly rate was actually livable.

By my second contract, I’d become the factory foreperson.

I quickly learned how easy it is to stop seeing fellow creatives as people and start seeing them as output. Promoted to lead editor (with an accompanying raise to $65 an hour), my job was to review the work of a constantly growing team. Each was given a task that I evaluated and gave feedback on. Then, they completed a second assignment. If they rated lower than a four out of five on that second task, I had a decision to make. I could authorize and evaluate a third try. Or I could have them off-boarded.

At the onset, I was loath to jeopardize anyone’s income. After all, I was one of them. I understood their nervousness navigating the technology and their frustration with the pace of the work. They needed the pay as much as I did, so I gave them all third—and some even fourth and fifth—chances. I spent hours DMing back and forth with the ones who were slower to catch on. I coddled them like I did my creative writing undergrad students, sometimes off the clock because I had a strict time limit of 20 minutes per evaluation.

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Within two weeks, I’d become ruthless, and not only when their work was subpar. If they DM’d me too often on Slack, I would put them on my hit list. If they complained I was taking too long to evaluate them, off with their jobs. On Zoom, their faces, creased with worry lines, and their sycophantic appreciation of the gig, did nothing to spark my compassion. The writers became less like colleagues to me and more like never-ending, unresolved tasks and Slack pings.

I quit one week into my third contract. The project manager in San Francisco released tasks at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. PT. If we didn’t manage to grab a share of the work at those two specific times, we were out of luck. Writers descended on newly released tasks within seconds. One East Coast contractor posted in the #general Slack channel how hard it was to access work due to the limited hours and tasks. The manager responded with a shrug emoji. When I quit, I didn’t notify them. Ghosting seemed more in line with the ethos.

While the current zeitgeist is obsessed with AI churning out novels, screenplays, and journalism that replace works written by humans, I left AI work with a more nuanced perspective.

I’ve now toiled for three different LLM platforms and tinkered around on my own with two others. I’ve seen AI mimic good writing. But no matter how much training award-winning writers provide, AI will never know the awe of watching a Himalayan sunrise, the bliss of falling in love, the fear of impending death, or the grief of watching a wrecked Honda Prelude towed off the Bay Bridge. AI can never capture the mixture of relief, rage, and sorrow I felt surviving that accident uninjured.

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Yes, it’s harder than ever to earn a living writing without entering the AI economy in some form. And while the machines may keep learning to imitate us, I’m more worried about the reverse. I experienced firsthand how easily a time clock, an overwhelming tide of Slack messages, and the rare chance to be paid as a creative eroded my willingness to prioritize people. I watched myself become less humane in a matter of weeks. That unsettles me far more than anything AI might write.