A couple of centuries at least. Though it's historically framed as waged-labour. It could be seen as rebranding of a market that was usually hidden from westerners: data classification. Amazon's Mechanical Turk, or well, anything Facebook. Google was brazen and just duped people into working for free. Those captchas you solved? To train computer vision to decipher text--oh, you don't solve those anymore? You need to click on the bicycles, busses and traffic lights? Some businesses pay nominal wages, others just steal everything.

I am tracking intent being for an AI agent to do with its own managed funds vs part of the pipeline the dev set