ChatGPT can code and tutor. Now, project documents obtained by Business Insider show how contractors working on an OpenAI project are helping the system to become ever more specialized in niche areas like animal husbandry, agriculture, music composition, and even commercial flying.
Under Project Stagecraft, as it is internally known at data-labeling startup Handshake AI, freelancers are being paid at least $50 an hour to create materials that will be used by ChatGPT to understand various occupations, one contractor told Business Insider.
Business Insider reviewed dozens of pages of documents for the project, including step-by-step instructions for contractors. In these files, contractors from various industries were directed to develop a persona and create tasks that reflect real work.
The project, which has employed about 3,000 to 4,000 freelancers, is ongoing, the contractor said.
San Francisco-based Handshake AI expanded from a job platform aimed at young professionals to the data-labeling industry. It’s part of a slew of startups that pay hundreds of thousands of contractors around the world to filter, rank, and train AI responses for the world’s largest tech companies. This data work helps improve everything from self-driving cars to OpenAI and Meta’s chatbots.
As AI gets smarter and more capable, data-labeling platforms have shifted from generalist work to increasingly specialized tasks that require field expertise or postgraduate degrees. According to Handshake’s website, expert taskers can be paid up to $500 per hour for contract work in job listings that were not explicitly tied to OpenAI.
A Handshake training guide for Stagecraft shared with contractors says that the focus is on “knowledge work, not manual labor.” The data collected would help “map economically relevant tasks and evaluate the model’s capabilities.”
“We all were aware that we were basically training AI to replace us,” one contractor, who works in a niche area, told Business Insider.
OpenAI and Handshake did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Handshake’s OpenAI work included soil scientists and sculptors
This is a selection of the project’s occupations from a 439-row spreadsheet of jobs sent to contractors and obtained by Business Insider.
The document, which could be read by anyone with a link, included hundreds of contractors’ personal email addresses and other information.
The project directed contractors to write a set of prompts to simulate tasks specific to their occupation or area of expertise, as if they were directing a colleague with real-world asks.
The company told contractors to create a persona — like a nurse practitioner — and give that persona context, goals, references, and deliverables, like a 10-page review of medical literature about a specific disease. The steps to achieve that deliverable could only be digital.
“The request should reflect real-world workflows and professional expectations, without adjusting the level of detail based on assumptions about what an AI ‘needs,'” reads a Handshake training guide instructing contractors on how to create these prompts.
One example that aims to train ChatGPT to sound like a “financial manager” says:
“You work for a theatre that employs local musicians for touring Broadway shows. Use the attached collective bargaining agreement (CBA) excerpt to build a spreadsheet in Excel that can be used by the local music contractor to submit weekly payroll for hired musicians.”
To ensure accuracy and quality, the material that the contractors create goes through two sets of reviews at Handshake — including one by an industry expert who was asked to focus on “job-specific details relevant to the task.” OpenAI conducts a third review.
Contractors’ work “directly shapes how models understand real professional tasks, helping them learn from genuine human expertise so they respond more accurately, ethically, and reliably in real-world contexts,” Handshake’s project training manual says.
Last month, Business Insider reported that some contractors working on Handshake’s OpenAI projects said the AI training startup denied them up to several thousand dollars each for work they performed, after accusing them of breaking platform rules.
“This decision is final. There is no appeal process, and any work associated with this violation is not eligible for payment. We will not be able to offer further consideration on this matter,” Handshake support wrote to one contractor in an email seen by Business Insider.
A representative for Handshake declined to comment about the pay issues, and OpenAI did not respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment.
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