Guardian: Sidelined Hollywood Creatives Now Train AI Models

Ruth Fowler, a Los Angeles screenwriter who created the BBC One drama Rules of the Game (starring Maxine Peake) and co-wrote Paramount Plus's Little Disasters (starring Diane Kruger), spends her spare hours grading the output of AI systems for pay. Her line to the Guardian about what that work is: "teaching it how to take our jobs."

Fowler has done 20 of these contracts for five different platforms in eight months. She started, she says, "because I was thinking: wow, I'm always broke." Her own read on the slump is looser than the official numbers: "I think production is down by 35% or something insane."

The official numbers are stark. Shoot days in LA fell 48% between 2021 and 2025, according to FilmLA Research, and Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show motion picture and sound recording jobs sliding from 450,000 in July 2022 to 326,000 by May 2026, a 28% decline. Meanwhile the share of arts postings on Indeed tagged AI-related roughly doubled between May 2025 and April 2026, from nearly 5% to nearly 11%, outpacing AI's growth in the broader jobs mix (2.8% to 5.5%).

The mechanic here is Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback: writers, editors and VFX artists rating draft AI output, giving models the kind of notes they had once hoped to be paid to receive themselves. The buyers are increasingly out in the open too. Netflix has said AI was used in about 300 of its 1,000 titles in 2026, and directors including Ron Howard have begun embracing the tools. That sits alongside our earlier coverage of Aronofsky and Blomkamp building AI-native studios on US and Chinese models.

Fowler is one of a smattering of Hollywood creatives now going public with the RLHF work.