Is there a position available anywhere in the world where I can simply take an assessment to identify my skills and capabilities, receive assignments accordingly, complete them remotely, and submit them without the need for ongoing communication or visits? I prefer a role that allows for flexible, independent work hours.
I have ten years of experience as a paralegal but am seeking a different type of work that doesn’t require returning to school, interaction with others, or leaving my home. I am highly capable but uncertain about my next career steps and am looking for a more autonomous work arrangement.
All the sites I am about to talk about are exactly like this:
https://dataannotation.tech/
On one hand, you’re helping “train” AIs to replace human jobs (bad). On the other hand, the more work you do for them, the more you’ll feel like no matter how much work people like you do for these kind of shitty companies, there is no fixing AI through training like this, that LLM General Purpose AI is fundamentally broken at its core (good?). So, you’ve got that going for you.
Further, they definitely have higher paid gigs for people with specialized skills/knowledge such as paralegal work history and education. I’m not sure about the paralegal, but people with coding experience can get $40-$80/hr tasks, so the more specific your experience, the more you get paid. I was averaging about $28 an hour, since they didn’t have a lot of tasks for my skillset.
There’s a couple other companies like this as well, but I haven’t been able to get into them.
https://www.babel.audio/ - Similar but focused on audio-conversation AI training
Also, there’s a few dedicated to Market Research, but I have failed to get into those as well:
https://connect.cloudresearch.com/
https://www.prolific.com/participants
Data Annotation definitely has much better and higher paying projects than the market research gigs, but I don’t know about Babel’s payment schemes at all.
One nice thing about all these is that you really can make your own schedule and choose to work when you want (providing there is work available).
It is difficult to rely on these for consistent income because sometimes your dashboard is absolutely filled with work and other times there won’t be projects to work on for weeks at a time. You’re also “competing” to complete tasks with people all over the world, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so a project that opens up in the middle of the night while you’re asleep might be already out of tasks to do by the time you wake up because people on the other side of the planet finished all available tasks.
These all count as “gig work” where you are like an Uber/Lyft driver. You are essentially working for yourself and you will need to track your income and report it for tax purposes at the end of the year.
You will unfortunately be forced to use PayPal to get paid. I hadn’t used PayPal in a solid decade because of how shitty of a company they are, but there were no other options to receive payments.
WARNING:
Keep extremely well documented spreadsheets of your work history, what days you worked, for how long, how much you were being paid per hour, and your final payout for the specific task. I initially thought they would keep showing you all of that on their website but they do not! Once you take a payout, all prior information beyond one week to current date will disappear. It’s also helpful to compile screenshots of that data while it is available to cross-reference with your own spreadsheets, just make sure to take those screenshots before you take a payout.