By Jack Maguire

I was unemployed for a little bit when I got an offer from Mercor. The hourly pay looked pretty good. I can’t say much about the clients or specific materials because of the privacy policies and non-disclosure agreements I signed, but I don’t think the work was worth it.

On my project, the work meant going through documents, slideshows, and decks. I wasn’t allowed to use AI for the work. Everything felt timed, like taking a test. You had to be completely on, focused on the screen and moving the mouse. It almost felt torturous to do it.

The work was repetitive. I found I wasn’t cognitively capable of doing more than about an hour a day. You have to pause the timer to take breaks. The way it worked out for me, I would take the hourly rate and divide it by four. That is what I felt I was actually making, because I couldn’t realistically work a full hour in one human-world clock hour.

I don’t think working 40 hours a week on it is realistic. Even 10 hours sounds like a lot. Ten to 12 hours a week might be the most I could imagine sustaining. It’s incredibly difficult work.

I really hope this isn’t the future of gig work. It feels like extracting people’s attention and cognitive abilities. The work is mind-numbing and cognitively difficult at the same time, and it isn’t fun. It’s the least fun work I can think of. I hope AI isn’t taking us toward a future where everything gets automated and then people are paid to supply their taste in the most boring, non-engaging way possible.

I’d like to see Mercor make the site more engaging, maybe with some kind of social or gamification element, and make the work less manual and less eyes-on-screen all the time.

On the surface, it looks like good pay, but I didn’t find it to be a great gig. I’m sure some people are making money from it. I just found that I couldn’t make that much. I’m pretty good at taking tests and focusing, but this requires a level of focus I find very difficult, especially in a world of AI everything and short-form video.