Silicon Valley AI developers are hiring literary writers and general humanities expertsTo improve the depth, range, and quality of artificial-intelligence (AI) creative writing, major Silicon Valley training data firms are hiring literary writers with humanities backgrounds to write or annotate original short stories, novels, and poetry to feed their AI models.
In an article in the September 20, 2023 issue of
Rest of the World website, writer Andrew Deck reports that high-profile training data companies such as Scale AI and Appen are recruiting poets, novelists, playwrights, or writers with a Ph.D or master’s degree, and more of these companies are also looking for general annotators with humanities degrees or those with extensive work experience in literary fields. The want ads are mostly for English literary writers while others are specifically targeting poets and fiction writers in Hindi, Japanese, and in languages less represented on the internet.
The contractors will write novels, short stories, or poetry on a given topic to be fed into the AI models being developed, and they will provide feedback on the literary quality of their current AI-generated text.
Prof. Dan Brown, a professor at the University of Waterloo (Ontario) who researches computational creativity, describes the demand for these AI-oriented jobs: “If you can properly generate tabloid headlines in French, that’s one thing. But if [a product] can replicate [Victor] Hugo’s style or somebody famous, that gets a different kind of credibility. Replicating classical language forms is a way of looking prestigious.”
The client rosters of Scale AI and Appen include some of the biggest names in AI development, among them OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Microsoft that are all trying to take the lead in the increasingly growing and competitive generative AI race.
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