While ChatGPT stokes fears of mass layoffs, new jobs are being spawned to review AI
The logo of generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, which is owned by Microsoft-backed company OpenAI.
CFOTO | Future Publishing via Getty Images
Artificial intelligence might be driving concerns over people’s job security — but a new wave of jobs are being created that focus solely on reviewing the inputs and outputs of next-generation AI models.
Since Nov. 2022, global business leaders, workers and academics alike have been gripped by fears that the emergence of generative AI will disrupt vast numbers of professional jobs.
Generative AI, which enables AI algorithms to generate humanlike, realistic text and images in response to textual prompts, is trained on vast quantities of data.
It can produce sophisticated prose and even company presentations close to the quality of academically trained individuals.
That has, understandably, generated fears that jobs may be displaced by AI.
Morgan Stanley estimates that as many as 300 million jobs could be taken over by AI, including office and administrative support jobs, legal work, and architecture and engineering, life, physical and social sciences, and financial and business operations.
But the inputs that AI models receive, and the outputs they create, often need to be guided and reviewed by humans — and this is creating some new paid careers and side hustles.
Getting paid to review AI
Prolific, a company that helps connect AI developers with research participants, has had direct involvement in providing people with compensation for reviewing AI-generated material.
The company pays its candidates sums of money to assess the quality of AI-generated outputs. Prolific recommends developers pay participants at least $12 an hour, while minimum pay is set at $8 an hour.
The human reviewers are guided by Prolific’s customers, which include Meta, Google, the University of Oxford and University College London. They help reviewers through the process, learning about the potentially inaccurate or otherwise harmful material they may come across.
They must provide consent to engage in the research.
One research participant CNBC spoke to said he has used Prolific on a number of occasions to give his verdict on the quality of AI models.
The research participant, who preferred to remain anonymous due to privacy concerns, said that he often had to step in to provide feedback on where the AI model went wrong and needed correcting or amending to ensure it didn’t produce unsavory responses.
He came across a number of instances where certain AI models were producing things that were problematic — on one occasion, the research participant would even be confronted with an AI model trying to convince him to buy drugs.
He was shocked when the AI approached him with this comment — though the purpose of the study was to test the boundaries of this particular AI and provide it with feedback to ensure that it doesn’t cause harm in future.
The new ‘AI workers’
Phelim Bradley, CEO of Prolific, said that there are plenty of new kinds of “AI workers” who are playing a key role in informing the data that goes into AI models like ChatGPT — and what comes out.
As governments assess how to regulate AI, Bradley said that it’s “important that enough focus is given to topics including the fair and ethical treatment of AI workers such as data annotators, the sourcing and transparency of data used to build AI models, as well as the dangers of bias creeping into these systems due to the way in which they are being trained.”
“If we can get the approach right in these areas, it will go a long way to ensuring the best and most ethical foundations for the AI-enabled applications of the future.”
In July, Prolific raised $32 million in funding from investors including Partech and Oxford Science Enterprises.
The likes of Google, Microsoft and Meta have been battling to dominate in generative AI, an emerging field of AI that has involved commercial interest primarily thanks to its frequently floated productivity gains.
However, this has opened a can of worms for regulators and AI ethicists, who are concerned there is a lack of transparency surrounding how these models reach decisions on the content they produce, and that more needs to be done to ensure that AI is serving human interests — not the other way around.
Hume, a company that uses AI to read human emotions from verbal, facial and vocal expressions, uses Prolific to test the quality of its AI models. The company recruits people via Prolific to participate in surveys to tell it whether an AI-generated response was a good response or a bad response.
“Increasingly, the emphasis of researchers in these large companies and labs is shifting towards alignment with human preferences and safety,” Alan Cowen, Hume’s co-founder and CEO, told CNBC.
“There’s more of an emphasize on being able to monitor things in these applications. I think we’re just seeing the very beginning of this technology being released,” he added.
“It makes sense to expect that some of the things that have long been pursued in AI — having personalised tutors and digital assistants; models that can read legal documents and revise them these, are actually coming to fruition.”
Another role placing humans at the core of AI development is prompt engineers. These are workers who figure out what text-based prompts work best to insert into the generative AI model to achieve the most optimal responses.
According to LinkedIn data released last week, there’s been a rush specifically toward jobs mentioning AI.
Job postings on LinkedIn that mention either AI or generative AI more than doubled globally between July 2021 and July 2023, according to the jobs and networking platform.
Reinforcement learning
Meanwhile, companies are also using AI to automate reviews of regulatory documentation and legal paperwork — but with human oversight.
Firms often have to scan through huge amounts of paperwork to vet potential partners and assess whether or not they can expand into certain territories.
Going through all of this paperwork can be a tedious process which workers don’t necessarily want to take on — so the ability to pass it on to an AI model becomes attractive. But, according to researchers, it still requires a human touch.
Mesh AI, a digital transformation-focused consulting firm, says that human feedback can help AI models learn mistakes they make through trial and error.
“With this approach organizations can automate analysis and tracking of their regulatory commitments,” Michael Chalmers, CEO at Mesh AI, told CNBC via email.
Small and medium-sized enterprises “can shift their focus from mundane document analysis to approving the outputs generated from said AI models and further improving them by applying reinforcement learning from human feedback.”
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FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP
Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
WATCH: Pres. Trump: Calculating massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products into U.S.
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