Remotasks purports to pay freelancers to train AI models. But this site forces you to engage in unpaid training before every assignment, which drastically reduces the hourly rate you earn.
What is Remotasks?
Remotasks is one of many research firms that aim to teach artificial intelligence models to be more intelligent. They do that by enlisting freelancers to “train” AI to do things it is bad at — like recognizing and separating specific items in photographs, categorizing things and evaluating AI answers to various questions.
A subsidiary of Scale AI, Remotasks works almost identically to Outlier — another Scale AI division. And, indeed, the sites largely merged in 2024, with Remotasks workers getting gigs through Outlier and vice versa.
How it works
Signing up is easy. You can even use a Facebook or Google sign in to start. You’ll also need to verify your identity with a government issued ID.
However, to get your first tasks, you’ll need to take an online training course that’s likely to require 30 minutes to an hour to complete. And you’ll need to take proficiency tests in English and writing.
Remotasks review
Training AI models is often billed as an easy work-from-home side gig. But it’s not as easy as it appears, at least if you want to get paid a reasonable amount for your time.
That’s because, while Remotasks supposedly pays $18 or more per hour, it does not count mandatory training for each task. And the mandatory training can take as much time — or more — as the paid task. Freelancers say this causes your real hourly rate to fall into the “negligible” category, often adding to just $2 or $3 per hour.
There are still some high-end gigs here that pay $30 or more per hour and deliver a reasonable amount of work. However, these gigs are becoming less frequent. And freelancers complain about doing hours of training only to find an empty work queue.
You’re expendable
And then there’s the harsh reality of what AI is all about — replacing you. AI companies realize that humans are a necessary evil to get their models up to speed. But once you’ve trained the model, you’re through. Thus, you could spend hours going through the training module to find out that there’s no work — or only a few minutes of paid work left for you to do.
Notably, there appears to have been a significant decline in the amount people earn with Remotasks over the past couple of years. This may be because the models are getting smarter and humans are not as desperately needed.
Pay
Workers are paid every Wednesday via PayPal or AirTM.
Recommendations
If you have the right skills, there is some money to be made training AI models, at least for now. And, while Data Annotation is slightly more freelancer-friendly, Remotasks and Outlier deliver at least a fair amount of work. Whether that work will be well paid or terrible is really a matter of how badly they need your skills. You can sign up with Remotasks here.
However, if you have deep knowledge in any topic, there are better side hustles that don’t involve AI. For instance, if you have business and project management experience, you can sign up with a half dozen consulting firms that largely operate online. These include Respondent, UserInterviews, Maven and Catalant.
If you have knowledge about medicine or some other practical field that generates a lot of consumer interest, consider signing up with JustAnswer, which pays freelancers to answer consumer questions.
And, if you’re an expert in English, Math or the sciences, consider tutoring through an online platform such as Wyzant. With Wyzant, you set your own rates and parents hire you based on your skill.
What their users say (from Reddit)
Average Remotasks project for me: Get put on a project.
-Do unpaid training / paid training tasks for said project.
-Go empty queue, or no work available, for several weeks with nobody to contact because the support team has the IQ of a potato.
Remotasks is legitimate in that there are people who have made money legitimately off of it. However, it is not a good option for most. It is very difficult to get started and requires hours of unpaid training and verification tasks even to get a chance to work on paid tasks. And unless you have very specialized skills, the tasks pay wildly under minimum wage. The website also has awful support which wouldn’t be an issue if you didn’t constantly require support because it is such a badly designed program.
Honestly not worth your time unless you’re desperate for any kind of online work. I tried it for a bit out of curiosity, and the unpaid training alone was a slog — tons of confusing modules and verification steps before you even touch a paid task. And when you finally get to the paid stuff, most of it pays pennies. You can easily spend an hour doing something detailed and end up making two or three bucks. Their support is also painfully slow. And errors on their end often mean you don’t get paid for your work.
From Indeed
It’s interesting work but unstable. Would have liked to go further in the company and learned more but its project based. Nice coworkers but management was lacking.
The company is sketchy. They fired me without notice and without cause. The work when I was working was sparse. The communication was very poor with little to no clarity. When I asked why I was removed from rating, they could not give me a clear answer. I also was not paid for certain tasks I completed, and was told by a lead that I might not get that as they had not gotten paid for some previously, but since it was a small amount, to not worry about it.
From Glassdoor
Have worked about 18 months for Remotasks as a finance / economics SME, helping develop generative AI LLMs by writing prompts and evaluating responses. I typically average 10-15 hours a week to supplement my consulting work and teaching roles. I loved the project work I did to train LLMs on finance tasks, such as valuation and financial analysis. The pay was acceptable, paid weekly, the work was interesting to me, and we had sufficient support for project methodology.
But a long-running project wound down, and I was offered new projects at lower rates. On two occasions, I completed initial training (one hour) to find the work queue empty, and then moved to another project. I started another finance-related project that was interesting, but have not been paid for the work I did. I am out maybe 10 hours worth of work, so no big deal. But the support quality has declined noticeably, the work is more sporadic.
