If you have strong creative instincts, the ability to portray emotions authentically, and are able to stay true to the character’s voice throughout the scene, the job listing requires your experience.
Problem: You will not perform in a theater, film studio, or underground performance venue. According to the open role posted by Handshake, a company that provides training data to OpenAI and other labs, you’ll use your talents to train AI models for “one of the leading AI companies.”
Handshake AI is one of a handful of companies of its kind, struggling to provide more and more niche or specific training data to AI labs to feed models. AI models are often described as “jagged”, meaning that they are generally great at some surprisingly complex tasks but fail profoundly at some simple tasks. AI companies are trying to fix the gaps in their models’ knowledge with special data labeling, and companies like Handshake, Mercor, and Scale AI have adjusted accordingly, hiring professionals in a wide range of industries.
Demand for Handshake’s training data tripled last summer The Verge The run rate hit $150 million in November, reported in December, and the company struggled to meet demand. Handshake and its competitors have touted their networks of thousands (or more) of professionals in white-collar industries, from chemists and doctors to lawyers and screenwriters. Many of these professionals worry that they are training AI models in a way that will make their careers obsolete even faster than they otherwise might have been.
And now major AI labs have come to sketch comics, improv actors, and more.
“Handshake AI is inviting actors, improvisers, and performers to join a paid, collaborative improv project working with one of the leading AI companies,” the job description says. Promising participants “will be matched with other artists on video and given a light prompt or scenario to explore together.”
The job listing calls for people with a background in acting, improv, sketch, or any kind of theater work, and at times goes to great lengths to indicate that it is looking for people who can essentially “test the limits of the understanding of the world’s top LLMs” by teaching models how to recognize or replicate human vocalizations and emotions. For example, “emotional awareness” is one of the requirements, specifically “the ability to recognize, express, and shift between emotions in a way that feels authentic and human.” The job listing also called for “conversations that feel grounded, human, and fun to play.”
Handshake declined to comment, and the listing does not specify what the training data will be used for.
In recent years, AI companies have leaned heavily into “multimodal” models that can not only generate images and video, but also talk to users through voice interactions with realistic inflections. After OpenAI first tested ChatGPIT’s voice mode, the company leaned more toward the feature in 2024, when it introduced an upgraded version with a suite of different voices to choose from. Elon Musk’s xAI offers voice chat within Grok. And Anthropic’s cloud has offered a voice feature, at least in beta, since last May.
The Handshake job listing states that the sessions are “unscripted and open-ended”, adding that participants will “improvise scenes, explore characters, and respond naturally in the moment, with plenty of creative freedom to shape how each interaction unfolds.” The role also promises part-time, flexible work that is “easy to fit in with auditions, classes or rehearsals” with an average wage of $74 per hour. but as The Verge As recently reported, the starting salary of these projects often decreases rapidly after a participant signs up, and the flexible nature of the schedule does not seem so flexible when employees are competing for a limited number of new tasks that may be available, or gone, at any time.
Members of the r/improv community on Reddit have discussed the Handshake AI job listing at length, with some calling it “dystopian.” “This is clearly an attempt to train AI models to make people create AI generated videos,” one user wrote. Another wrote, “I think they’re trying to teach it human conversation, not how to improvise. My plan was to destroy the inputs.” Another joked, “Now AI is coming for our lucrative improv comedy jobs.”
Another user wrote, “I predict people are getting bored of online services and want some degree of real, face-to-face entertainment. I think this could be a great marketing angle for improv teams: let’s see real, unpolished, laugh-out-loud comedy that isn’t generated by a computer.”
<a href