The investigation by The Verge and New York Magazine establishes the mechanism with unusual specificity. Companies like Crossing Hurdles are not offering generic data-entry roles — they are paying a premium for legal reasoning, scientific judgment, and professional writing because those are the competencies AI models need to internalize to pass as credentialed professionals. Katya's progression through freelance journalism, graduate school, and content marketing before landing on annotation work is not an outlier trajectory; it is the shape of a labor market that has systematically closed each credentialed exit [laid-off…