Teaching AI to Do Your Job

The reason, in Meta's words: "our models need real examples of how people actually use them." Its chief technology officer, in a memo The Verge reported: "our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve." Asked about opting out, he replied: "There is no option to opt out of this on your work provided laptop."

Staff petitioned: more than fifteen hundred signatures, then more than eighteen hundred. In April, Meta also told staff it would cut about ten percent of its workforce; the cuts came in May. In June, some of the recorded data was found to be exposed to other staff, and Meta suspended it. As of September, it's still suspended. Meta says any return will be optional.

Outside the big firms, teaching AI has become a job of its own. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, paid by the hour to write the tasks and grade the answers. Typical trainers, 60 Minutes reported, are paid anywhere from twenty to two hundred dollars an hour. One platform, Mercor, says it pays out more than two million dollars a day.

Mercor's chief executive, on 60 Minutes: "you're changing human work… I think that evolution is natural." The MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate: "the number of people they're employing in these positions is small relative to the number of people who will be replaced. I mean, that's the whole point of automation."

Brendan Foody, Mercor's chief executive, in full as CBS aired it: "Well, I think that you're changing human work. It might not necessarily be that repetitive task… And so I think that evolution is natural." (4:33 to 4:47.) Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel Prize-winning professor at MIT, from 11:56 to 12:12 of the same programme; his sentence begins "Because the number of people they're employing…".

And the work can stop overnight. Last September, Elon Musk's xAI told hundreds of its AI tutors: "we no longer need most generalist AI tutor positions."

xAI's email of 12 September 2025, as quoted by Business Insider: "As part of this shift in focus, we no longer need most generalist AI tutor positions and your employment with xAI will conclude." At least 500 people lost their jobs, and the same email said xAI would "accelerate the expansion and prioritization of our specialist AI tutors".

The machines are learning the job from the people who do it. The question is who's still employed when the lesson's over.

What we couldn't confirm: Reuters' own wording on the recording (its reports are paywalled), and any change to the program's status after 11 September.