> There was some protection in the fact that it was prohibitively expensive to get someone to listen to every single one of our phonecalls/read all our emails/etc.
That's already how it worked on platforms like mturk and uhrs, lots of the work was transcribing audio dumps from microphones built into computers/phones/smart home devices. UHRS especially had a lot of that (it's owned by MS) as well as search engine grading type work. They also certainly do not pay well, I'd imagine that in practice there isn't much cost difference to paying a bunch of bored people to do it vs the compute cost for running an AI model to do it, but the AI model will be vastly more accurate and will work 24/7.
That's already how it worked on platforms like mturk and uhrs, lots of the work was transcribing audio dumps from microphones built into computers/phones/smart home devices. UHRS especially had a lot of that (it's owned by MS) as well as search engine grading type work. They also certainly do not pay well, I'd imagine that in practice there isn't much cost difference to paying a bunch of bored people to do it vs the compute cost for running an AI model to do it, but the AI model will be vastly more accurate and will work 24/7.