Fancy working part-time as Al's tutor’?

After her second child was born, Ms Chelsea Becker took unpaid leave and found a side hustle: training artificial intelligence (AI) models for a website called Data Annotation Tech.

- 

For a few hours every day, Ms Becker, 33, would sit at her laptop and interact with an Al-powered chatbot. For every hour of work, she was paid between US$20 (S$27) and US$40. From December to March, she made more than US$10,000.

The boom in AI technology has put a more sophisticated spin on a kind of gig work that doesn't require leaving the house.

The growth of large language models such as the technology powering OpenAI's ChatGPT has fuelled the need for trainers like Ms Becker, fluent English speakers who can produce quality writing.

It is not a secret that AI models learn from humans.

For years, makers of AI systems such as Google and OpenAI have relied on low-paid workers, typically contractors employed through other companies, to help computers visually identify subjects.

They might label vehicles and pedestrians for self-driving cars or identify images on photos used to train AI systems.

But as AI technology has become more sophisticated, so has the job of people who must painstakingly teach it. Yesterday's photo tagger is today's essay writer.

There are usually two types of work for these trainers: supervised learning, where the AI learns from human-generated writing, and reinforcement learning from human feedback, where the chatbot learns from how humans rate their responses.