A screenwriter with real television credits is now getting paid to teach a computer how to write television. That is the strange trade playing out across Hollywood right now, where experienced writers, directors and producers are signing up with AI training companies to hand over the exact skills that used to define their careers.
The pay is not bad. Depending on the task and the company, rates run from 12 dollars an hour up to 200 dollars an hour. One producer job posted this week by Micro1 asked for people with more than five years of credited production experience to design realistic budgeting and scheduling scenarios, paying up to 85 dollars an hour. That is solid money for someone between jobs.
And there are a lot of people between jobs. Shoot days in Los Angeles have fallen from roughly 36,800 in 2022 to under 19,700 in 2025, close to a halving in just three years. Nationally, jobs in the motion picture and sound recording business dropped from 450,000 workers in mid 2022 to 326,000 by May of this year, a drop of more than a quarter. Around 41,000 people left the industry entirely between 2022 and 2024. Netflix, meanwhile, says it used AI tools in roughly 300 of its titles this year, mostly to speed up editing and post production work.
This setup is not unique to entertainment. The company doing much of the hiring, Mercor, connects lawyers, doctors, financial analysts and now Hollywood veterans with AI labs including Anthropic and OpenAI that need real expert judgment to make their models better at complicated, high stakes tasks. Mercor was valued at 10 billion dollars after a funding round last October. By this July, it was already in talks to raise money again at a 20 billion dollar valuation. Investors are betting that expert knowledge, not more computing power, is what makes the next generation of AI genuinely useful, and they are paying handsomely to buy it.
Here is the part worth remembering. This exact business model started years ago with much lower paid workers overseas, hired through companies like Scale AI to label data and correct AI outputs for a few dollars an hour, sometimes for less than minimum wage. As models got better at the simple tasks, that work dried up and rates fell, leaving only the hardest judgment calls to humans. There is no reason to think the Hollywood version, or the lawyer and doctor version, will follow a different path.
So the honest read here is not that AI is coming for creative jobs someday. It is that the people who know a craft best are currently being paid, often gladly, to compress that craft into a form a machine can copy. That is not unique to film. Any business built on specialized human judgment, whether that is underwriting an insurance policy, negotiating with a supplier or running a factory floor, is a plausible next customer for exactly this kind of company. Worth watching if your business depends on expertise that has never been written down before.