When her phone vibrates with a WhatsApp alert from her “Task Hunters” group, she has little time to react.

Fuentes, 35, rushes to her computer and logs on to Appen, an artificial-intelligence data platform where she has been tagging data for the past decade. She works quickly as she competes with thousands of other crowd-workers for 5–25 cents per task. With each click, she may choose the genre of a movie, decide if an image is AI-generated, or solve a math problem.

Fuentes is among the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who do informal work for the tech industry. As Venezuela’s economic crisis worsened and its currency became nearly worthless around 2018, educated Venezuelans signed up on AI-training and freelancing platforms to earn in U.S. dollars. They formed up to 75% of the workforce at companies like Mighty AI and Scale AI in 2018. Remotasks even created a special program to attract Venezuelan workers.

They annotated all kinds of data to train AI tools, such as vision models, autonomous vehicles, and warehousing robots. They also moderated violent content and wrote articles to optimize websites for search.

But with the rise of generative AI, such digital jobs have become scarce and poorly paid, workers and researchers told Rest of World. Without formal contracts, the workers have little choice but to find ways to compete with AI, or quit.