TL;DR

A Guardian investigation finds skilled US workers aged 50 and over turning to AI data annotation contracts — labelling and evaluating model outputs — after long spells of unemployment in their professions. Pay typically starts at $20-$40 an hour, with specialists occasionally reaching $180, but contracts are unstable and benefits absent.

The new bridge job

The workers interviewed include a former emergency medicine physician who earned up to $500,000 a year, an occupational therapy academic, and a software architect now living in motels. Each applied to hundreds of roles in their fields before accepting AI training contracts through firms such as Mercor, GlobalLogic, TEKsystems, micro1 and Alignerr, whose clients include OpenAI, Google and Meta.

Labour economists quoted in the piece describe the work as a new form of “bridge job” — the lower-paid roles older workers historically took while edging towards retirement. The difference is that these bridge jobs exist specifically to train the systems that may replace them. US workers over 60 take around 50% longer than people in their 20s and 30s to find new jobs, per the AARP Public Policy Institute.

UK relevance

The UK mirrors the underlying dynamic. ONS data show over-50s who lose work take substantially longer to return than younger cohorts, and the same global annotation platforms recruit UK-based contractors. As Resultsense has noted in previous coverage of UK AI skills funding, training programmes have focused heavily on entry-level and mid-career reskilling — older displaced workers remain a blind spot.

The Guardian’s subjects describe the work as intellectually engaging but warn that it could be short-lived. One software architect interviewed expects his role to disappear within a year as models need less human oversight.

Looking forward

Expect the “AI trainer” category to become a growing but quietly shrinking labour market: high demand now, diminishing as reinforcement learning from human feedback matures and synthetic data substitutes for human labellers. For UK policymakers weighing labour market responses to AI, the Guardian’s reporting is a warning that the displaced workers best placed to train the systems are also the ones who will be displaced again first.