An OpenAI-Scale Mercor Contractor Pool Is Being Fired for Using AI to Write AI Training Data
404 Media (Mercor spokesperson on record) / Hacker News (74pts, 54 comments)·medium signal
404 Media reported on September 22 that contractors hired through Mercor to improve OpenAI's models are being removed for using AI in their tasks. Their guidelines ban AI tools, down to 'Grammarly and AI translation'. A Mercor spokesperson confirmed: 'When we confirm an expert has used AI to complete a task, we immediately remove them from the project.' Reviewers flag repetitive phrasing and fast completion times. That is the same heuristic detection that fails elsewhere, now applied to the people producing frontier-model training data.