What’s Trending: AI Trainers
July 14, 2026
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Have you heard about AI trainers? What are they? An AI trainer is a new career in which humans identify and fix the small (or big) mistakes AI makes across different fields.
An AI trainer is a new career path gaining traction, but as the world grows increasingly distrustful of AI, can this career survive? How did it even start? Can you get a job in it, and is it as lucrative as it seems?
Continue reading below to find out.
A new career is emerging thanks to AI, and it is not engineering, Charles Rollet and Shubhangi Goel report for Business Insider. The role of AI training is somewhat new, but it has been gaining ground thanks to companies such as Mercor, Surge AI, Scale AI, and others.
According to one particular article, even LinkedIn is beginning to dip its toes in the AI marketplace, with the launch of tests for one of the fastest-growing jobs in the USA. This is mostly because it’s the next logical step of gig work.
“AI trainers are humans who help improve chatbots by rating their answers and testing their limits.”
This type of gig work is not only for entry-level jobs; some of the best-paid gigs are actually for professionals who help train chatbots across fields such as nursing, medicine, engineering, languages, and more.
Now, these companies might seem like a step up for many, as salaries tend to start at $40 dollars an hour and can reach up to $200, but there are many concerns. Companies such as Mercor have been facing cybersecurity issues, with data from their contractors leaked.
Nikki Goth Itoi wrote a piece for Stanford discussing the privacy issues currently affecting various AI companies. According to a recent study, AI companies are using people’s conversations to train their chatbots. Anthropic’s Claude even put it in its latest update; people need to opt out so they’re not taken into account.
The problem is that people are not thinking about their data and privacy when entering sensitive information into chatbots, assuming it is protected. Financial, medical, and other personal data, such as their family’s faces and information, would be catastrophic if it were to get out.
“In the case of multiproduct companies, such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, user interactions also routinely get merged with information gleaned from other products consumers use on those platforms – search queries, sales/purchases, social media engagement, and the like.”
An issue is that some companies are too big and reach too far into people’s lives, like Google and Amazon. To combat this, some states have better privacy laws, like California, but this is the state that has the most comprehensive privacy policy and even then, it’s not quite there.
So, ignoring the privacy issues, does this mean that AI training roles are better for the future of work? Not quite, according to Aaron Mok’s Guardian article.
Patrick Ciriello’s story, as told in the article, reveals a generation of highly skilled workers who have suffered from one downturn after another. Taking into account the dotcom boom, the 2008 recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and now the AI boom, not even IT engineering jobs are safe.
“For experienced professionals, AI training contracts can be a side hustle – or a temporary fallback following a layoff – where top experts can, in some cases, earn over $180 an hour. But that’s on the high end.”
The problem is that the current job market is brutal, and older workers are struggling to find jobs that pay for their skills. With the mass layoffs in 2024, senior workers are competing for lower-paid jobs against recent grads. This has been retooled into career minimalism for some Gen Z’s who are giving up on climbing the career ladder, not out of laziness, but from listening to those who have been dropped from the companies that they were loyal to.
AI training is the next step in gig work, and just like driving around, it can help many people, but it’s disrupting many industries. For some people, this can help them get some extra money, but others, such as older and experienced workers who are being discarded for AI, they’ve been reduced to teaching their replacement how to do the work they used to do for less pay.
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