Behind the AI boom, an army of overseas workers in ‘digital sweatshops’

This isn't exclusive to AI. Long before AI-data-labelling was a thing, there was hundreds of services like this for transcription and other piecemeal online work. The work goes to the lowest-prices, capable bidder. The end result is unfortunately these situations.

Amazon has had a version of this for more than a decade, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk