Khaleda Khan did everything right for a career in journalism. She freelanced throughout university, interned at major Canadian publications, and graduated in late 2024 with a solid portfolio. Then she spent four or five months applying for every entry-level media job she could find. Nothing stuck.

Her brother sent her a job posting that matched her writing and research skills. It wasn't at a newspaper — it was at xAI, training the company's AI chatbot, Grok.

For six months, Khan's job was to improve Grok through a mix of transcription, linguistic review, and quality control — what she calls "being an editor of a robot." She corrected transcription data across global accents, trained the model to speak and understand Hindi and Urdu, reviewed AI-generated videos for visual errors, and traced how the model arrived at answers, correcting hallucinations on high-stakes topics like politics and crime.

"There were a lot of transferable journalism skills that I was really able to use," she said. "There were not really as many people in tech as there were people in the humanities. There were a lot of writers there."

Then her contract wasn't renewed, and she was suddenly competing as a freelancer against the very AI she'd helped build.

"While I was working there, I was thinking, 'Am I helping make something that will replace me?' I still wonder about this," Khan said. "I didn't know I was going to be a freelancer competing with this. I didn't know it was going to happen so quickly."

She's far from alone. Darius Osborne, a Howard University graduate, couldn't land a newsroom job either and ended up as a data labelling analyst at Meta, reviewing AI-generated videos and content for quality standards. The job gives him financial stability to keep freelancing on the side.

"I often think I am training my replacement," Osborne said. "But I also know we are moving into a different job market, and if I find myself stuck again and need a job, I now have experience in AI that can help me support myself."

His daily work has also convinced him that AI is nowhere near replacing human journalism. "If this whole thing were a vehicle, AI would be the car and humans would be the gas," he said. "We are definitely the fuel behind the whole thing."

In India, Bisma Farooq — a freelance journalist with five years of experience — took an AI data annotation job to supplement her income. She lasted only briefly. "Once I entered this, I had an existential crisis," she said. "Your creativity goes down and your thinking ability goes down. It is very different from journalism."

Bettina Blass, a German freelance journalist since 2003, took a different path — she spent a year and a half with a German AI startup building an editing tool that converts press releases into news articles. She wrote the rules and prompts, teaching the AI inverted pyramid structure and journalistic fundamentals.

"AI won't go back in the bottle," Blass said. "It makes much more sense to learn now at the beginning of AI, how badly it will reach us. I see it's no magic. Without humans who are working with it and who are training the tools, AI wouldn't exist."

All four journalists agreed that AI cannot replicate the creativity, judgment, and human perspective at the heart of journalism. And none rejected AI outright — working inside the machine had made them more comfortable with it as a tool, not less. But they also shared a quiet anxiety: the skills they're using to train AI today may be the same skills that become obsolete tomorrow.