All Hollywood screenwriters have switched to training AI models

Hollywood screenwriters who lost income due to strikes and industry layoffs have found an unexpected source of income: they are training AI models by evaluating text generated by neural networks and creating training datasets. This is a visible symptom of deep changes in the creative labor market.

From Scripts to Data Labeling

One Hollywood screenwriter shared detailed experience: over eight months he concluded twenty contracts with five different AI development platforms. The work is monotonous and requires attention to detail: evaluate the quality of text generated by a neural network, find errors and inaccuracies, complete examples, mark systemic biases in training datasets. Fees start from several hundred dollars and rarely exceed a thousand per contract. For a screenwriter accustomed to writing for television shows with much larger fees, this is a financial catastrophe. But it is better than earning nothing at all and feeling cast out from the industry to which he devoted his career.

Why Everyone Is Doing This at Once

The author emphasizes: he is not alone. Directors, producers, costume designers, other writers — all are simultaneously concluding the same contracts with AI platforms. This is the end of an entire era when creative workers could live on primary work in the film industry with guaranteed income and social status. Several factors coincided at the same time:

• Writers Guild (WGA) and actors (SAG-AFTRA) strikes in 2023 paralyzed production for months
• Studios are rapidly implementing AI tools, reducing demand for new original scripts
• Content consumption shifted to streaming platforms, traditional orders no longer exist
• Huge demand emerged for workers training AI — labeling, annotation, quality control

Creative workforce was ready: many unemployed writers, writing and editing skills, experience noticing errors in texts. For them this became a natural choice.

An Uncomfortable Analogy

The author uses an old analogy from cinema: actors historically waited their turn working as waiters and taxi drivers. But the scale has changed. When everyone simultaneously seeks part-time work, part-time work becomes full employment, and a part-time career becomes everyday life. AI platforms win obviously: cheap, quality workforce, no long-term obligations to workers, direct licensing of results. Screenwriters win conditionally: there is income, the ability to stay in the industry ecosystem, albeit on its periphery, a sense of participation in content creation.

End of an Era

This phenomenon shows how AI ceases to be merely a tool and becomes a new labor market — a market for labeling, annotation, correction. Screenwriters no longer write for people. They write training data for machines that are gradually displacing them from their own profession. It is unclear how long demand for human labeling and editing will last. Probably in a few years AI will begin to quality-check its own errors, and demand will disappear. But one thing is clear: Hollywood's retraining has already begun in real time. This is only the first wave of a major shift in the content industry.