@wired: Ruth Fowler’s name on the platform is ri611. Or h924092b12ee797f, depending on who is paying her. She works as an AI trainer, assessing whether a chatbot’s tone is natural or flat, affected or annoying. She identifies patterns in pictures of furniture; searches the internet for group photos of strangers whom she’ll eliminate from the portrait, one by one. Fowler works for companies with names like Mercor and Outlier and Task-ify and Turing and Handshake and Micro1. In her “other” career, Fowler is a Hollywood writer and showrunner. She creates prime-time TV, usually featuring a middle-class white lady having the worst day of her life, with some salt-of-the-earth police interference to raise the stakes. You can find her shows on Paramount and Hulu and the BBC. Between February and April 2026, Fowler was hired and fired on seven different projects over four different platforms. One moment she would be typing rubrics into an Airtable, waiting in line on a 24-hour Zoom to talk through a task with a reviewer. The next, the UI would vanish. The Slack channel would disappear. The Google docs would lock her out. No message. No warning. No explanation. Fowler never intended to write about this industry. She came to it not as a journalist but as a disgruntled, broke TV writer determined to make a dent in student loans and keep paying LA rent while her industry withered in front of her. But working with and for AI had proven even more cruel than she could have ever imagined. Mercor says it employs about 300 full-time staffers. Meanwhile, each week it keeps some 30,000 independent contractors caught up in a fever dream of aimless, directionless urgency, corralled across Slack channels by achingly young adults, sending messages at 3 am to “push on” and “finish strong” and “lock in” and “Go Team GO!” Tap the 🔗 in bio to read the full story. This story was supported by a generous grant from the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. 🎨: Anastasia Kraynyuk

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Monday 11 May 2026 17:14:14 GMT