They Lost Their Jobs to AI Hype. Now They're Getting Paid to Make It Worse.

A laid-off patent attorney in Ohio is spending her Tuesday afternoon teaching an AI model how to draft prior art searches. She gets paid $35 an hour. The model will eventually do this work for $0.003 per query. She knows this. She does it anyway, because rent is due. This is the story New York Magazine ran last month, and it has the kind of irony that makes you laugh before it makes you sick. Thousands of scientists, lawyers, and researchers, many of them displaced by the first wave of AI adoption, are now the primary workforce.