AI Labs Seek Improv Actors to Teach Machines Human Emotion

Handshake AI and other data-labeling firms are recruiting improv performers to help train leading AI labs, aiming to teach models to recognize and express human emotion in unscripted scenes for multimodal AI. The gigs pay around $74 per hour and are pitched as flexible, but workers warn that pay can dwindle and schedules can be unstable, raising concerns about the impact on performers’ careers as labs push toward more humanlike AI.