AI Company Offers Up to $30,000 for Professional Documents

Handshake AI, a San Francisco-based company, is recruiting collaborators to provide professional documents in exchange for compensation. The company offers up to $30,000 for high-quality contributions, paying six dollars per page for approved documents. Interested candidates must have experience in consulting, finance, law, software engineering, or data science. The company requires contributors to own the documents and be authorized to share them. Each collaborator can submit up to 50 documents with up to 100 pages each, but only approved pages receive payment. The initiative raises concerns among data privacy experts. Thomas Ahlering, partner at the law firm King & Spalding, questions how the company will verify document ownership, what type of model will be trained with the data, and whether there are adequate review mechanisms to prevent confidential information from being included. Lawyers warn that documents created during employment often belong to the employer, not the employee. When documents contain sensitive information from previous clients or were created for clients, the question of ownership becomes even more complex. Ahlering notes that most employers would refuse to authorize the transfer of rights to such materials.