Elon Musk’s AI company wants to pay award-winning writers to train its chatbot on how to do their jobs. On Wednesday, xAI, the company behind Musk’s Grok chatbot posted a job listing calling for writers to produce “elite-level writing” in a variety of fields, with the goal of refining Grok’s writing capabilities. The bar for those writers is rather high, from Emmy-nominated screenwriters and Guggenheim fellows to New York Times journalists.
As AI threatens white-collar jobs, tech companies like Scale AI and Mercor are hiring well-educated professionals, from ex-lawyers to history Ph.D.s, to teach AI models how to replicate their work, often with intermittent gigs and variable pay.
xAI’s job listing appears to follow this trend, but it’s exemplary in the stringency of its requirements. For fiction writing, for instance, writers must meet at least two criteria from a list. These include novel sales of more than 50,000 copies; starred reviews in Kirkus or journals; short stories published in New Yorker-tier magazines; and recognition from Hugo or Nebula awards.
Poets are required to hold advanced degrees and boast a “history of awards, fellowships, or residencies from recognized organizations.” Journalists must have several clips in “major outlets (e.g., NYT, BBC), with awards, citations, or engagement metrics.”
Day-to-day responsibilities for the writers include providing feedback on AI-generated writing, producing “high-quality curated data” — this refers to writing, presumably — to feed Grok, and working with engineers to train the chatbot.
In exchange for their work, writers are compensated at an hourly rate of $45 to $125, depending on experience. Some positions are full time; others are contract and part-time gigs. Curiously, the company notes that it is not able to hire in the states of Illinois and Wyoming.
SFGATE reached out to xAI for comment on the job listing but did not receive a response before the time of publication.