In July 2023, I received a LinkedIn message from a Scale AI recruiter inviting me to apply as a law domain expert on Remotasks, a Scale AI-owned platform that preceded Outlier.
I was onboarding by early August, but didn’t do much work on the platform until March or April of 2024. They were offering daily bonuses for working a set number of hours. Good pay rates with regular bonuses, weekly payments, and not needing to look for clients on a regular basis made the AI work more attractive than the content creation work I’d been doing. I put my travel agency franchise on the back burner.
Since then, AI training has been my main source of income. I typically work around 30 to 35 hours a week, and I supplement that with some online writing.
Though I started as a law domain expert, I rarely ever worked on projects with a legal focus. Instead, I work on a wide variety of general, non-STEM topics that require specialized multimedia prompt engineering and AI response evaluation skills, as well as quality assurance work.
I worked on the Mindrift platform very briefly last year. However, nearly all my AI work was with Remotasks, then Outlier, until this summer. Now, the bulk of my AI training work is with the Mercor AI platform.
Outlier paid me $45 per hour, then $40 per hour. Now my rate with them ranges from $35 to $50, but they have a setup that drops the rate to $21.16 after a set time that is never sufficient for completing the task, so the effective rate is always lower than the starting or stated rate. It’s one more reason I generally avoid working there now.
Mercor pay rates vary greatly, but the projects I’m currently working on pay $45 and $45.50 per hour.
Some highs of freelancing on these platforms include the opportunity to work in a cutting-edge industry and being able to attain valuable skills. It’s also attractive pay for my experience and skills. Another plus is teamwork with some very smart, funny, and talented co-workers.
There are lows as well. There is no job security, and some projects are short-term, which means I have to continuously apply to new ones. However, project extensions are frequent, and I am often referred to new projects by my project leads for doing good work.
The work can be monotonous, and some of the projects can be run poorly, resulting in chaos and frustration.
A Scale AI spokesperson told Business Insider that Outlier gives contractors pay rates and estimated task times at the start of a project. “When contributors flag that certain tasks regularly take longer than expected, we review those tasks and adjust where appropriate.”
