If you feel like your previous employer didn’t compensate you adequately, there might be a way to profit from that job, even if it seems legally (and, depending on how you feel about artificial intelligence, morally) dubious. According to a Wall Street Journal reportAI training data giant Mercor is offering people a payment in exchange for selling their past work materials.
According to the reportMercor has been snooping around a number of industries, including the entertainment space, and asking professionals if they’d be willing to sell stuff from past work. VFX 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 stuff that’s industry-specific and would be very difficult for the average person to get their hands on.
It will probably be difficult for Mercor to achieve this as well. like him WSJ notedMuch of what the AI training data company requests probably belongs to the employer for whom the work was initially performed. Employees and contractors who have worked on these types of domain-specific projects are typically subject to a series of contracts that prevent them from sharing information related to their work. Much of this is likely to be covered by intellectual property laws, and workers themselves are often forced to sign confidentiality agreements.
While the company said in a statement to the Journal that Mercor “does not purchase intellectual property,” the outlet also said that messages sent by Mercor to employers regarding its past work included the phrase “looking to purchase.” Mercor could plausibly claim that it is not specifically seeking intellectual property in these requests, but it seems an inevitable result of such purchases.
Mercor has made a name for itself by shelling out expertise in the field, paying people (often those who have lost their jobs) with job- and industry-specific knowledge to train AI models. But anyone considering trying to secretly profit from some old work material should probably proceed with caution if they expect any protection from Mercor.
The company recently suffered what appears to be a massive data breachwith up to 4TB 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 sort of thing you wouldn’t want made public if you were slyly selling proprietary material.
