If you feel like your previous employer didn’t properly compensate you, there might be a way to cash in on that work—though it seems legally (and, depending on how you feel about artificial intelligence, morally) dubious. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, AI training data giant Mercor is offering people payment in exchange for selling their prior work materials.
Per the report, Mercor has been poking around a number of industries, including the entertainment space, and asking professionals if they’d be willing to sell stuff from previous jobs. Visual effects artists told the Journal that Mercor asked for production work like “4D physics scenes with camera data, depth and motion/point tracking”—the kind of material that is specific to an industry and would be very difficult for the average person to get their hands on.
It’ll probably be difficult for Mercor to get their hands on, too. As the WSJ pointed out, a lot of what the AI training data company is asking for likely belongs to the employer for whom the work was initially done. The employees and contractors who have worked on these types of domain-specific projects are usually subject to any number of contracts that prevent them from sharing information related to their work. Much of it is likely covered by 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 did include the phrase “looking to purchase.” Mercor could plausibly claim that it isn’t specifically seeking IP in these requests, but it does seem like an inevitable outcome of such purchases.
Mercor has made a name for itself by shelling out for domain expertise, paying people (often ones who have lost work) with specific job and industry knowledge to train AI models. But anyone considering trying to cash in on some prior work material on the down low should probably proceed with caution if they’re expecting any protection from Mercor.
The company just recently suffered what seems to be a massive data breach, with as much as 4TB worth of sensitive data falling into the hands of hackers. According to the group that claimed responsibility for the breach, the stolen data includes candidate profiles, personally identifiable information, and employer data. Pretty much the exact kind of stuff you wouldn’t want to be made public if you were slyly selling protected material.
