Hollywood is training its own replacement

THE LINKEDIN MESSAGE was polite, professional, and — to anyone who read it carefully — breathtaking in its audacity. Mercor, a San Francisco-based startup valued at $10 billion, was reaching out to visual-effects artists who had spent decades building blockbuster worlds for Disney and Sony, offering to purchase their prior production work: 4D physics scenes, depth maps, motion-tracking data. The kind of high-end material that trains AI models to do, eventually, what those same artists do for a living. Several artists who received the pitch pointed out an inconvenient detail: they do not own the work, their former employers do, and selling it would violate the NDAs that govern virtually every studio contract in Hollywood.

Mercor insists it only licenses content from individuals who own it, and requires signatories to attest as much — though it does not verify ownership. The company's outreach, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, nonetheless illuminates a deeper structural tension in the AI economy. Frontier labs have an insatiable appetite for specialized, domain-expert training data; the easy internet corpus has largely been consumed. Epoch AI, a research institute, projects that the stock of high-quality public text data will be fully utilized between 2026 and 2032. As that wall approaches, the hunt for fresh material has shifted from scraping the open web to soliciting the proprietary work of professionals — and the professionals in question are, increasingly, the very people whose livelihoods AI threatens to displace.

Rendering unto Caesar

Yet the VFX industry's predicament extends well beyond one startup's ham-fisted outreach. A study cited by the Hollywood Reporter found that roughly a third of entertainment executives expected more than 20 percent of industry jobs — an estimated 118,500 positions — to be eliminated by 2026, with visual effects and postproduction flagged as especially vulnerable. Eighty percent of early AI adopters in entertainment already deploy the technology in postproduction workflows. The artists being asked to sell their work are not doing so from a position of strength; many are freelancers who weathered COVID shutdowns, the 2023 writers' and actors' strikes, and a broader contraction in studio spending. One VFX artist who spoke to the Journal captured the dilemma neatly: some colleagues refuse Mercor's overtures on principle, while others, out of work and out of options, simply do not care.