Khaleda Khan spent four to five months searching for entry-level media work after graduating in late 2024. Throughout university, she'd freelanced and interned at major publications across Canada. But the job market was brutal — dozens of applications, almost no replies. Then her brother sent her a job posting that matched her writing, research, and multilingual skills. It was at xAI, training Grok.
For six months, her job centered on improving AI systems through transcription, linguistic review, and quality control — or as she put it, "being an editor of a robot." She corrected Grok's transcription data across global accents, trained it to speak and understand languages beyond English including Hindi and Urdu, reviewed AI-generated videos for visual and creative errors, and helped refine model outputs by identifying unnatural phrasing or tone issues.
"There were a lot of transferable journalism skills that I was really able to use in my everyday duties," she said. "I was surprised because the person who hired me also had a reporting background. There were not really as many people in tech as there were people in the humanities. There were a lot of writers there."
But when her contract wasn't renewed after six months, the irony hit her hard. "While I was working there, I was thinking, 'Am I helping make something that will replace me?' I still wonder about this. 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."
Now back to freelancing, she sees AI handling routine work like sports scores and press releases — freeing human reporters for higher-impact journalism. But the transition is real, and it's personal. "Journalism is already in this weird transitional phase, where not many people are reading, but people do want content, and journalism is not the same as content," she said. "It is going to revolutionise how we use AI for audiences, not just how we use it in journalistic practice itself."