The poets trying to give AI taste - New Statesman

When Erin Hoover, the poet laureate of Cookeville, Tennessee, was getting her PhD in creative writing, her professor used to ask her: “Why did you write this?” Were you to ask an AI model today the same question – writing requests account for about a quarter of all prompts to ChatGPT – its answer might, truthfully, be: “Because Erin taught me to.”

Alongside her work as a poet and professor of poetry at Tennessee Tech University, Hoover is an AI trainer. She works for Mercor, a tech recruitment company that pays more than 30,000 “experts” upwards of $4m (£3m) a day to train AI models. It has hired almost five million such people since 2023. Mercor’s clients include OpenAI (which owns ChatGPT) and Anthropic (which developed Claude). Over the past year I have noticed Mercor advertising roles including “novelist” and “poet” on LinkedIn – not job titles you would typically expect to encounter on the app, let alone from a Silicon Valley start-up. The salary offered for both jobs was up to $150 an hour.

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