AI May Not Have Taken Your Job Yet—But It’s Already Coming for the People Who Build It
AI is often framed as the looming threat to jobs across industries, but right now, the first casualties seem to be the very people who make these systems possible. Capitalist pressures, cost-cutting, and corporate restructuring are sweeping through the AI industry, leaving thousands of data workers, contractors, and researchers without jobs—even as companies pour billions into the technology.
According to Wired, more than 200 people working on Google’s flagship AI products, including its Gemini chatbot and the AI Overviews that now appear in search results, were recently laid off. Many weren’t full Google employees but contractors hired through GlobalLogic, a software development firm owned by Hitachi. Their role? Acting as “raters,” the human evaluators responsible for checking and refining AI responses to ensure accuracy and quality. Many of these raters were highly educated—holding master’s degrees and even PhDs—yet they were among the first cut when Google pulled back.
The official explanation given to some workers was that the layoffs reflected a “ramp-down” in the project. But not everyone is convinced. Some employees suspect the cuts were tied to growing unrest over pay and job security. Wired also reported that internal documents suggest GlobalLogic has been experimenting with using AI itself to replace human raters—essentially creating a system where artificial intelligence moderates artificial intelligence.
Google’s move is part of a much broader trend. At Elon Musk’s xAI, at least 500 employees working on data annotation—the painstaking, behind-the-scenes labor of labeling and categorizing information so AI can learn—were recently let go. Unlike Google, which shed specialized raters, xAI appears to be shifting from “generalist” annotators to “specialists.” That might sound like an upgrade, but in practice it represents yet another shuffle that leaves workers wondering if they’re next.
Meta’s AI efforts have seen similar turbulence. Shortly after the company invested in Scale AI, a major player in data labeling, Scale laid off 14% of its workforce—200 full-time staffers and roughly 500 contractors. Meta itself is reportedly weighing cuts to its AI division as it struggles to reposition in an increasingly crowded race for dominance.
The irony is hard to ignore. While the lower-level workers doing the grunt work are treated as disposable, AI “superstars” at the top are being courted with multi-million-dollar compensation packages. In other words, the people labeling data, stress-testing outputs, and ensuring these tools don’t spiral into nonsense are the ones most vulnerable to layoffs, while executives and high-profile researchers cash in.
It’s a familiar story in tech: the invisible labor that keeps the machine running is undervalued and easily cut, while the flow of money and prestige rises to the top. But in AI, the contradiction is especially stark—because without that human input, the very systems these companies are betting their futures on can’t function at all.