If you are an award-winning writer or a screenwriter who has worked with a big film studio, then you have a golden opportunity to work for Elon Musk’s company xAI. Musk is hiring experienced writers to make his Artificial Intelligence (AI) ‘Grok’ even more intelligent. According to this recent job listing, they are looking for experts from many fields like medical, legal and journalism so that AI can be given better training. The special thing is that for this work they are ready to pay an excellent salary of $40 to $125 (i.e. approximately ₹ 3,300 to ₹ 10,400) per hour.
Grok has a long history of controversies
XAI’s goal is to teach ‘Grok’ to write in different styles with the help of excellent writers, so that he can become smarter than before. However, this is the same chatbot which has been quite infamous in the last one year due to its controversies.
Grok has faced many serious allegations, such as that he talked about promoting racism and even praised Hitler and supported the genocide. Apart from this, cases of making ‘deepfakes’ (fake obscene pictures and videos) through Grok also came to light, due to which countries like Indonesia and Philippines have completely banned it.
What are the terms and conditions of employment?
Interestingly, XAI has set very high qualification standards for this job. For example, it is mandatory for a fiction writer to either have a deal with a major publishing house or to have sold more than 50,000 copies of their novel. Moreover, if a writer has more than 10 short stories published in prestigious publications like ‘The New Yorker’ or has been a finalist for major awards like Hugo and Nebula, then only he/she will be considered eligible for this post.
Same is the case with screenwriters, who have been asked to have at least two feature film credits with big studios like Netflix, Disney or Warner Bros. Without this, they must have at least a nomination for a prestigious award like an Oscar or an Emmy.
AI will replace only those who teach it
At one level it seems logical that XAI is looking for experts with the best experience, but on deeper consideration this move also seems a bit disrespectful to the writers. In fact, the world’s most talented writers are being expected to train the technology that is being built to possibly replace them in the future. On top of that, they are being offered a very low starting salary of $40 an hour compared to their skills and stature. This new recruitment process of Elon Musk is going to intensify this old debate once again.
