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AI companies want to harvest improv actors’ skills to train AI on human emotion

The Verge / 3/15/2026

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Key Points

  • AI companies are recruiting improv actors to train large language models and other AI systems on human emotion and tone.
  • A Handshake job listing describes the role as leveraging an actor's skills to train AI for 'one of the leading AI companies,' with OpenAI and other labs named as users of the training data.
  • Handshake AI is among a small group racing to provide increasingly niche or specific training data to AI research labs.
  • The move is part of a broader trend of outsourcing nuanced human performances to improve AI, with potential implications for workers and the data market.

If you've got strong creative instincts, the ability to authentically portray emotion, and are capable of staying true to a character's voice throughout a scene, there's a job listing calling for your experience.

The catch: You won't be performing in a theater, a film studio, or an underground performance space. You'd be using your talents to train an AI model for "one of the leading AI companies," according to the open role posted by Handshake, a company that provides training data to OpenAI and other labs.

Handshake AI is one of a handful of companies of its kind, scrambling to provide more and more niche or specific training data to A …

Read the full story at The Verge.