The journalists training AI models for Meta and OpenAI

In December, Carla McCanna received a message from a recruiter at the AI training data company Outlier. McCanna, a recent graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, had never heard of the company, but the message came through Handshake, a recruiting portal hosted by the university. “The recruiter said my skills align with a writing expert role and that I’d be training AI models to optimize accuracy and efficiency,” McCanna told me. At the time, McCanna had no experience in data work, machine learning, or the tech industry. The skills the recruiter alluded to were her journalism experience — her professional writing, research, and fact-checking abilities. She’d worked internships at The Dallas Morning News and the monthly D Magazine, and last August, she earned her master’s degree in journalism. Staff jobs are scarce, though, and the competition for them is daunting. (In 2024, the already beleaguered U.S. news industry cut nearly 5,000 jobs, up 59% from the pr ... Read full article.