CAGAYAN DE ORO, Philippines — In a coastal city in the southern Philippines, thousands of young workers log online every day to support the booming business of artificial intelligence.

In dingy internet cafes, jampacked office spaces or at home, they annotate the masses of data that American companies need to train their artificial intelligence models. The workers differentiate pedestrians from palm trees in videos used to develop the algorithms for automated driving; they label images so AI can generate representations of politicians and celebrities; they edit chunks of text to ensure language models like ChatGPT don’t churn out gibberish.