When Chelsea Becker became a mother for the second time, she took an unpaid, yearlong leave from her full-time job as a flight attendant before finding a new side hustle while watching a TikTok, writes Yiwen Lu for The New York Times.

That new side hustle was training artificial intelligence models for a website called, Data Annotation Tech.

For a few hours a day, the Schwenksville mother would sit at her laptop and interact with an AI-powered chatbot, earning between $20 to $40 an hour. 

She earned over $10,000 in a three-month period between December and March. 

The boom in AI technology has placed more emphasis on this specific kind of work that doesn’t require individuals to leave the house.

Instead it has led to the growth of large language models like ChatGPT, which has fueled the need for people like Becker. That is a person who is fluent speaking English and can produce quality writing.

AI models learn from humans, and as AI technology has become more sophisticated, so has the job of the people who must teach it.

The two types of work for these trainers are: supervised learning where the AI learns from human-generated writing, and reinforcement learning from human feedback where the chatbot learns from how humans rate their responses.

Read more about the evolution of teaching AI at The New York Times.

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