The LinkedIn post seemed like yet another scam job offer, but Katya was desperate enough to click. After college, she’d struggled to make a living as a freelance journalist, gone to grad school, then pivoted to what she hoped would be a more stable career in content marketing — only to find AI had automated much of the work. This company was called Crossing Hurdles, and it promised copywriting jobs starting at $45 per hour. Katya clicked and was taken to a page for another company, called Mercor, where she was instructed to interview on-camera with an AI named Melvin. “It just seemed like the sketchiest thing in the world,” Katya says. She closed the tab. But a few weeks later, still unemplo...