Amanda Brown grades biology students as an assistant professor at Tarleton State University in Texas. Last summer, while she wasn't teaching, she signed up to grade an AI model's answers.

What followed were tight deadlines, flat-rate gigs that swallowed far more hours than they paid for and her manager giving a verdict that her work didn't measure up, with no reasons provided.

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"It seems like easy money," Brown told The New York Times. "It really isn't."

Brown is one of tens of thousands of white-collar professionals now being paid to teach AI systems the jobs they spent years learning. A July 10 Times report (1) put numbers on the trade, showing how Mercor, a San Francisco-based startup that sells training data to AI labs, pays its network of 30,000 contractors upward of $4 million every day (1).

Mercor was reportedly in early talks in July that would peg its worth near $20 billion (2), according to Bloomberg.

Whether the work is worth it is a harder question now, and the people doing it have started answering.

The money sounds good. A listing on Mercor's job board offered up to $350 an hour for a psychiatry expert (3) to build clinical scenarios and check the model's answers against real medical standards, CBS News reported. Surge AI has advertised $300 to $500 an hour for management consultants and investment bankers (4), and up to $1,000 for venture capital partners.

Alignerr, a Labelbox subsidiary, pays contractors with credentials like a chemistry doctorate up to $200 an hour.

But most gigs pay less than that. Mercor told CBS News its roles average about $105 an hour (3), and a generalist job reviewing AI search results for errors pays $50 an hour (3). Brown herself thought that $60 an hour seemed like an attractive rate for these tasks.

Who's paying for all this expertise? The AI labs are. The big models have already read most of the internet, so the next round of improvement depends on experts checking their work. That could mean, for example, a law professor grading the model's brief the way she'd grade a first-year associate's. "We are now at a stage where they need more fine-tuning and reinforcement," Christine Cruzvergara, chief education strategy officer at recruiting startup Handshake, told CBS News (3).

Handshake only moved into AI data work in 2025 (1). It told the Times its annualized revenue rate hit $1 billion in April (1), nearly double the $550 million pace it started the year at.

The industry insists this is good news for workers. Edwin Chen, the billionaire founder of Surge AI, told the Times his company is creating paid work and building AI collaborators that will help knowledge workers do more rather than replace them, and predicted that training AI will one day rank among the "most prestigious" careers going.

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Ask the contractors and a different picture comes back. Sommer Wall, a lawyer who contracted with Mercor, told the Times she slept in snatches on her couch to survive three-day deadline sprints on the most demanding projects.

Brown grew frustrated with flat-rate gigs that took far longer than she'd budgeted for. On some projects, per the Times, contractors get paid only if a supervisor approves their output.

There's also a deeper problem.

Once a group of experts teaches a model a skill, projects in that specialty dry up (1), and this has been a complaint all over the Discord servers and Reddit threads where contractors compare notes, per the Times.

Carolina Perez Sands, a speech and language consultant who worked with Mercor, told "The Journal (5)," The Wall Street Journal's podcast, that the model learned from her fixes so fast that, in a matter of weeks, it barely needed her.

Some of the friction has even reached courtrooms. Contractors have sued Handshake, Scale AI, Surge AI and other data-training firms over alleged misclassification and underpayment, the Times reported. Mercor faces at least seven lawsuits (1) from contractors who say a data breach this spring exposed their personal information; most of those cases are ongoing.

The applications still pour in, as the regular job market is grim for many. Only 19% of college-educated workers (6) said now is a good time to find a quality job, according to a Gallup survey of more than 22,000 U.S. workers conducted in late 2025 — compared with 35% of workers without a degree.

If you're eyeing one of these listings, the question that matters is how long the money lasts.

The industry itself can't agree. Jonathan Stull, Handshake's chief operating officer, told the Times he expects giving AI models feedback to become a routine part of nearly every white-collar job.

Anton Korinek, a University of Virginia economist on a yearlong leave to work at Anthropic, told the paper that demand for human AI teachers should shrink as the systems improve, and compared predictions that everyone will do this work to claiming everyone will become a professor.

The volume of work you get may swing without warning, the pay structure can work against you and the customer needs you a little less every week that you do the job well.

Brown did the gigs on and off until December, then stopped. This summer, she found a teaching job.

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The New York Times (1); Yahoo Finance (2); CBS News (3); Built In (4); Apple Podcasts (5); Gallup (6)

This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: White collar workers are getting paid $200 an hour to train AI on their jobs — but it's not 'easy money'

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