"I no longer knew what the Golden Task of my own life might look like. When given the chance to respond to details from this article, Mercor said that it strives to give workers “as much notice as possible when these projects change”—a sentiment roughly echoed by other companies. Between February and April 2026, I was hired and fired on seven different projects over four different platforms. The dismissals were always abrupt, shocking. One moment I would be typing rubrics into an Airtable, waiting in line on a 24-hour Zoom to talk through a task with a reviewer. The next, the UI would vanish. The Slack channel would disappear. The Google docs would lock me out. No message. No warning. No explanation.

I never intended to write about this industry. I came to it not as a journalist but as a disgruntled, broke TV writer determined to make a dent in student loans and keep paying LA rent while my industry withered in front of me. But working with and for AI had proven even more cruel than I could have ever imagined. Mercor says it employs about 300 full-time staffers. Meanwhile, each week it keeps some 30,000 independent contractors caught up in a fever dream of aimless, directionless urgency, corralled across Slack channels by achingly young adults, sending messages at 3 am to “push on” and “finish strong” and “lock in” and “Go Team GO!” All in service of the grandest purpose in history: to successfully remove a scuba diver from a picture with one click of a mouse, transport him to the moon without any glaring artifacts—and bring him back again.

The next generations of team leaders won’t know our specific talents or our unique skills, but they will know the Average Time it takes us to annotate a grainy video uploaded without the owner’s consent into a vast catalog of other possibly stolen videos (...) To make the machine more human, they will make us more like the machine."

https://www.wired.com/story/i-work-in-hollywood-everyone-who-used-to-make-tv-now-training-ai/

#AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #LLMs #Mercor #GigEconomy

Data Breaches Surge, Exposing Sensitive Info at AI Startups, Agencies

Data breaches are surging, with AI startups and agencies exposed, as seen in the alarming theft of 10 petabytes from a Chinese supercomputer and 4 terabytes from AI startup Mercor due to a supply-chain vulnerability. These incidents highlight the hidden risks of connecting data to AI models, creating sensitive blind spots that leave large…

https://osintsights.com/data-breaches-surge-exposing-sensitive-info-at-ai-startups-agencies?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

#AiStartups #DataBreaches #EmergingThreats #Litellm #Mercor

After #DataBreach, $10B-valued startup #Mercor is having a month

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/09/after-data-breach-10b-valued-startup-mercor-is-having-a-month/

#cybersecurity #AI #LiteLLM

#Meta Pauses Work With #Mercor After #DataBreach Puts #AI Industry #Secrets at Risk

Major AI labs are investigating a #security incident that impacted Mercor, a leading data vendor. The incident could have exposed key data about how they train AI models.
#breach

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-pauses-work-with-mercor-after-data-breach-puts-ai-industry-secrets-at-risk/

AI firm Mercor confirms a breach linked to the #LiteLLM supply chain attack, as hackers claim 4TB of stolen data.

Read: https://hackread.com/ai-firm-mercor-breach-hackers-4tb-data/

#CyberSecurity #DataBreach #Mercor #AI #TeamPCP #Lapsus

A story in 3 parts

#AI #slop #recruiterspam #enshittification #databreach #mercor