Before You Teach AI Your Craft, Know What You're Giving and What You're Keeping

On October 4, 2026, 60 Minutes introduced a winemaker, a physician and a music producer who, after their full-time jobs, spend weekday evenings teaching artificial intelligence what they know.

They are Shawna Miller, Dr. Melania Poonacha and Robbie Hiser, three of the more than 100,000 experts who train AI models through Mercor, a fast-growing San Francisco company. On one project, they taught a model to interpret laboratory results accurately. On another, they compared two versions of a song lyric and explained which worked better and why.

According to the report, AI training is now LinkedIn's fourth-fastest-growing job category in America, and Mercor's trainers can earn anywhere from $20 to $200 an hour. For many professionals, that is an appealing way to earn extra income from expertise they spent years building.

If you are considering it, go in with your eyes open. The question is not whether the work is legitimate. It is what you are exchanging.

You Are Trading the Teachable Layer

Every craft has two layers. The first is the part you can explain: the rules, the patterns, the reasons one answer beats another. That is what AI training asks for, and it is real value. It took you years to learn.

The second layer is harder to describe. It is the instinct you bring to a situation you have never seen before, the taste that makes your work recognizably yours, and the trust people place in you because of who you are. The music producer made this point in the segment when he talked about the life experience a great song draws on, the kind a machine has never had.

Training AI trades the first layer. Your future depends on the second. That does not make the trade a bad one, but it does mean you should know what you are keeping and invest in it deliberately.

Three Things to Weigh

The income is real, but it isn't stability. More than a dozen current and former trainers told 60 Minutes the work comes unpredictably, or sometimes not at all, and is no substitute for a full-time job with benefits. Mercor's CEO, Brendan Foody, acknowledged that the hours are erratic and said the company is transparent about it. Treat the work as a side stream, not a foundation.

The work may reshape your own field. Many experts training AI believe their craft will always need a human touch, and they may be right. Still, the whole purpose of the training is to make models more capable in your discipline. Ask yourself honestly how that capability might change your work over the next decade, and what you will do differently because of it.

It can sharpen you, if you let it. Explaining why one answer is better than another forces you to put into words the judgment you usually exercise without thinking. That is valuable reflection. Professionals who use AI training to understand their own expertise more clearly may come out of it stronger.

Invest in the Part You Keep

Whether to teach AI your craft is a personal decision. The bigger decision is what you will do with the part of yourself AI cannot learn.

Start by naming it. What do people seek you out for that has nothing to do with your credentials? What problem do you solve that would still need you even if every rule of your profession were automated? When I work with leaders on their personal brand, those answers are usually the most important thing they know about themselves, and the thing they have thought about least.

Then put it to work. Take on the clients, projects and relationships that depend on that layer. Build a reputation for the hard judgment calls, not just the routine ones. As I explored in Your Employer Doesn't Have an AI Plan for You. Build Your Own., waiting for an organization to map your future is the riskiest plan of all.

It also helps to keep a simple record of the moments when your judgment mattered most: the call you made that others would not have, the client who stayed because of how you handled a hard conversation. Those stories are evidence of the layer you keep, and they will matter in every career move you make.

And keep reinventing. Reinvention means carrying forward what makes you distinct into the next chapter of your work, without abandoning what you built.

A Fair Trade

The experts on 60 Minutes struck me as clear-eyed. They have full-time careers, and they treat AI training as a side gig. That is a healthy place to start.

Teach the machine your rules if it makes sense for you. Just make sure you are also growing the part of your expertise no one can download. As I argued in AI Can Learn Your Expertise. It Can't Learn Who You Are., your most human advantage is the one you keep earning.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.