AI Training Data Giant Mercor Is Reportedly Looking to Buy the Work You Did at Your Old Job

If you feel your previous employer didn’t compensate you fairly, there might be a way to cash in on that work — although that sounds dubious legally (and, depending on how you feel about artificial intelligence, ethically). According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, AI training data giant Mercor is offering people payment in exchange for selling their prior work content.

According to the report, Mercor has been scouring several industries, including the entertainment sector, and asking professionals if they would be willing to sell items from previous jobs. Visual effects artists told the Journal that Mercor asked for production work such as “4D physics scenes with camera data, depth and motion/point tracking” – content that is specific to an industry and would be very difficult for the average person to obtain.

Perhaps it would be difficult even for Mercor to get its hands on them. As the WSJ reported, the AI ​​training data the company is seeking likely relates to the employer for whom the work was initially performed. Employees and contractors who work on these types of domain-specific projects are usually subject to a number of contracts that prevent them from sharing information related to their work. Much of it probably falls under intellectual property laws, and the workers themselves are often made to sign confidentiality agreements.

While the company said in a statement to the Journal that Mercor “does not buy intellectual property,” the outlet also said that messages sent by Mercor to employers regarding their previous work included the phrase “looking to buy.” Mercor may claim that it is not specifically seeking IP in these requests, but this seems to be the inevitable result of such purchases.

Mercor made its name by paying for domain expertise, paying people with specific job and industry knowledge (often people who have lost work) to train AI models. But anyone trying to cash in on some prior work material at lower levels should probably proceed with caution if they’re expecting any protection from Merker.

The company just recently suffered a massive data breach, with 4TB worth of sensitive data falling into the hands of hackers. According to the group that claimed responsibility for the breach, the data stolen included candidate profiles, personally identifiable information and employer data. Exactly the kind of stuff you wouldn’t want to make public if you were secretly selling protected material.