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 previous year, according to an annual report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.) “I’m most interested in magazines, feature writing, or culture and music writing, those jobs on LinkedIn get thousands of applicants,” McCanna told me. “While I’m looking for that full-time writing position, this [Outlier job] seemed great, because it’s completely remote and it’s good pay if you’re consistent with it.”

For the past couple months, McCanna has been working close to full-time for Outlier, picking up projects on its gig platform at about $35 per hour. Data work has quickly become her primary source of income and a hustle she’s recommended to other Medill classmates. “A lot of us are still looking for jobs. Three times I told someone what I do, and they’re like, please send it to me,” she said. “It’s hard right now, and a lot of my colleagues are saying the same thing.”

McCanna is just one of many journalists who has been courted by Outlier to take on part-time, remote data work over the past year. I spoke to local news writers, photojournalists, and radio reporters across the U.S. who received similar recruitment messages from the company or heard about the platform through word-of-mouth among freelance journalists.

Several of them told me they have taken on Outlier projects to supplement their income or replace their work in journalism entirely, because of dwindling staff jobs or freelance assignments drying up. Some are early-career journalists like McCanna, but others are reporters with over a decade of experience. One thing they all had in common? Before last year they’d never heard of Outlier or even knew that this type of work existed.

Launched back in 2023, Outlier is a platform owned and managed by Scale AI, a San Francisco-based data annotation company valued at $13.8 billion. It counts among its customers the world’s largest AI companies, including OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. Outlier, and similar platforms like CrowdGen and Remotasks, use networks of remote human workers to improve the AI models of their clients. Workers are paid by the hour for tasks like labeling training data, drafting test prompts, and grading the factual accuracy and grammar of outputs. Often their work is fed back into an AI model to improve its performance, through a process called reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). This human feedback loop has been core to building models like OpenAI’s GPT and Meta’s Llama.

Aside from direct recruitment messages, I also found dozens of recent public job postings that underscore this growing trend of hiring journalists for data work. These posts came from the AI industry’s leading training data companies including Appen, Data Annotation, and Scale AI itself. All of the openings list journalists as preferred candidates, often alongside editors, copy editors, and technical writers.

“Though our recruitment efforts with journalists aren’t new, we find they make great general contributors largely because of their writing and text comprehension skills,” said Joe Osborne, a spokesperson for Scale AI. “The remote and flexible nature of the work also tends to suit their needs and schedules.” Osborne also said the company is currently updating its “fact checker” job listings with the title “AI trainer,” to clarify that fact-checking on Outlier is not a form of direct content moderation.

Many job posts I found are looking for language experts, including journalists who speak languages and dialects less represented in the training data of major AI companies. I found posts for fact checkers internationally who speak Thai, Dutch, Hindi, and Swedish, as well as dialects like “Spanish (Mexico)” and “French (Canada).”  English-speaking journalists tended to qualify for more generalist job postings; these were often listed with titles like “AI writing evaluator,” “freelance writer,” and “fact checker.”

Eliza Partika, a freelance journalist based in Glendale, California, came across a similar post on LinkedIn in the spring of 2024. Partika had been contributing regularly to local news outlets like AfroLA and Crescenta Valley Weekly. After onboarding, Outlier gigs became an “incredibly helpful” source of income for her with most projects averaging between $17-$20 per hour. “It’s a freelance gig that I can come back to any time, so I plug in whenever I can,” she said.

Most of Partika’s work on Outlier takes place in 30-minute blocks and requires reviewing real, anonymized chat histories from products like Meta AI or ChatGPT. She then rates the model’s responses using a rubric. “If a user asks Meta AI to write a cover letter based on a job description, it would be my job to verify that the responding cover letter incorporated experiences specified in the job description, made grammatical sense, and used the proper tone for a cover letter,” she told me.

Frequently, these chats veer into more factual topics, including literature, math, and health. “If they ask what Hamlet’s soliloquy means, I have to verify that the AI responds with something about Hamlet’s soliloquy, but also that the analysis aligns with current thoughts on the subject,” she added. “If it’s a science fact, or math, I look it up.”

All the Outlier contributors I spoke to mentioned their work indexes heavily on fact-checking, including identifying hallucinations by models or marking when chatbots pull from incorrect sources on the internet. Many of them compared it to “spot checking” a story, focusing on key details like figures, proper nouns, and stated facts.

“I don’t have to interview anybody, but my research skills, my knowledge of history, my knowledge of politics, my reasoning skills, my fact-checking abilities, obviously the mastery of the English language, all of those skills [transfer],” said Cory Clark, who has been working as a local news reporter and freelance photojournalist in Philadelphia for over a decade. Clark has regularly freelanced for The Philadelphia Inquirer and photo wire services like the Associated Press, AFP, Getty Images, and Sipa Press.

Clark told me it has become increasingly difficult to support his family with his freelance journalism work, and last year he stopped pursuing new freelance assignments to work for Outlier. He heard about the platform after a colleague at The Local, a Northwest Philadelphia outlet, recommended it to him. “It’s a job that’s really well-suited for journalists,” he said.

Like any gig platform work, contracting for Outlier has not been without its challenges. Last summer, Clark said he struggled to find new projects on the platform and ultimately had to find another part-time job. Similar ebbs and flows in demand for workers can make income from Outlier inconsistent. The company has also come under fire for payroll issues, including accusations last year of mass non-payment for hours logged on the site.

Other workers told me their AI reviews often entail dealing with heavy or disturbing topics. “Quite often the content I look at is explicit or sensitive. We are asked not to rate those chats, and to flag them for sensitive content,” Partika said. Last month, Outlier workers filed a string of lawsuits against Scale AI, alleging their work had taken a psychological toll without providing proper support or safeguards.

For many journalists, though, the reason not to work for an AI training data company is more existential. Celia Hack, a reporter for the KMUW radio station in Wichita, Kansas, received a message from an Outlier recruiter on LinkedIn in February 2024. She wasn’t receptive to the outreach, instead taking to Twitter to post a screenshot of the recruiter’s message. Her tweet: “when they offer to pay you to help make your journalism job become obsolete.”

When they offer to pay you to help make your journalism job become obsolete>>> pic.twitter.com/VwG0sAYMsS

— Celia Hack (@CeliaHack) February 22, 2024

“I didn’t know about people actually getting hired to do that type of work,” she told me on a recent call, explaining that while she doesn’t worry about AI technologies displacing her own job as a local news journalist, the recruiter’s message still caught her off guard. “Honestly, I’m still kind of confused what that type of work would even look like.”

Hack isn’t the first to ask this question. The journalists I spoke to say their work for Outlier often takes some explaining to friends and peers in the industry. “People’s immediate reaction is usually, oh my god, so you’re helping the AI take over?” said McCanna, the recent Northwestern grad. Rather than training a replacement, McCanna sees her data work as an asset, growing her knowledge of AI tools as they continue to embed in the workplace. “Actually doing this work you realize AI models still need us … I think it’s going to be a really, really long time until they can truly write like humans.”

Clark, meanwhile, says he has been pitching Outlier to other journalists. Even those who were initially icy have warmed up to the idea. “They didn’t trust the AI aspect of it, but I laid it out, I was like, look, one way or another, this is the future, whether it’s as a tool for us or an eventual replacement for us.”

One of those friends is a photojournalist based in New York City. “I was like, dude, you pay thousands of dollars a month for your rent. I know you can’t always make that as a freelancer,” he said. “Outlier is a way to supplement that.”