How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart

Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent

In the spring of 2024, when Rachael Sawyer, a technical writer from Texas, received a LinkedIn message from a recruiter hiring for a vague title of writing analyst, she assumed it would be similar to her previous gigs of content creation. On her first day of work a week later, however, her expectations went bust. Instead of writing words herself, Sawyer's job was to rate and moderate the content created by artificial intelligence.

The job initially involved a mix of parsing through meeting notes and chats summarized by Google's Gemini, and, in some cases, reviewing short films made by the AI.