Hollywood creatives are training AI to do their jobs—and digging their own graves
Digging the grave of my skills: Hollywood creatives training AI to do their jobs
Amid a severe jobs slump, award-winning Hollywood writers, directors, and producers are taking temp work training AI models to replicate their own skills, from screenwriting to production scheduling. Paid $12 to $200 an hour by agencies like Mercor and Micro1, which contract with AI giants such as Anthropic and OpenAI, these creatives teach AI the intricacies of their craft, often with a sense of fatalism. One documentary director likened it to being 'handed a shovel and asked to dig the grave of my profession.' The trend highlights AI's growing role in an industry already shedding jobs, with Netflix using AI in 300 of its 1,000 titles in 2026.
I was essentially handed a shovel and asked to dig the grave of my profession.
- newsomix9xl
The movie "Singing in the rain" was about the job Apocalypse of sound technology that threw silent film actors and workers into the street, unemployed and hungry.
All those silent film era jobs were lost to the "talkies".
Hollywood not only survived, it expanded.
It is a truism in Hollywood that people always see good movies in any economy. If the industry is contracting maybe they're making bad movies no one wants to see.
AI won't change that at all.
- nottorp
Hollywood movies have become indistinguishable from each other before "AI" so I doubt anyone will notice.
- lxe
If you haven't been following the current explosion of video gen models, including all the content you see on social media, you should pay attention.
I have no doubt in my mind that right now, in August of 2026, given a couple of weeks, an amateur with a high-end last-gen GPU or somebody with maybe a thousand bucks worth of AI credits, given a good amount of exploration/tinkering to fill the gaps that GenAI cannot currently do, (which is storyboarding, screenwriting, characters, and all the actual creative stuff), can crank out a high quality 1h+ feature film with only minor uncanny artifacts.
The reason why this isn't happening en masse right now is that most creatives are probably not focused on generating feature films, but rather content that's more digestible by social media users.
I would expect to start seeing a LOT of development in the upcoming months as some form of commodification where generated content can be both high quality and tailored to the user.
- yomismoaqui
Hollywood creative is an oxymoron.
- mistrial9
Southern California Edison utility district famously required their office staff to train offshored support staff, and then did replace those office staff with the newly trained offshore workers
Southern California Edison IT workers ‘beyond furious’ over H-1B replacements - Computerworld 2015 -- The incident sparked legislative interest in California, with lawmakers proposing bills to restrict utilities from outsourcing critical infrastructure work and prompting at least 11 U.S. senators to request federal investigations into the use of H-1B visas in such outsourcing deals.