Most AI training guides are written for people with a credential to sell: a law degree, a medical licence, a decade of engineering. Generalist work is the other door, and it is much wider than the specialist one.
There are 50 open generalist roles this site tracks, carrying 25,419 openings. That is 33% of every opening across all 679 roles here, from 4 platforms.
The median role understates it
The headline number for generalist work looks weak. The median role advertises a ceiling of $42 an hour, against $100 for the site as a whole, and the floor runs down to $6.
Counting openings instead of roles reverses the picture.
| Advertised top rate | Roles | Openings | Openings per role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under $30 | 13 | 2,933 | 226 |
| $30 to $49 | 13 | 258 | 20 |
| $50 to $99 | 18 | 21,948 | 1219 |
| $100+ | 5 | 140 | 28 |
22,088 of the 25,419 generalist openings, or 87%, sit in roles paying $50 an hour or more. The low-rate listings are real, and there are plenty of them, but they hire in far smaller numbers than their share of the role count suggests.
This is the reverse of the pattern across the rest of the site, where the cheapest roles are the ones hiring in bulk. In generalist work the biggest listings pay above the median, because the projects driving them are large annotation programmes that need thousands of people quickly and are competing for them.
Two micro1 listings account for most of it: a Generalist role and a Video Annotation Specialist role, each carrying 10,000 openings at $50 to $90.
The floor is real too
Averages hide the bottom of this market, so it is worth naming plainly. Open right now are a Video Data Annotator at $7, two Data Annotator roles at $6 to $10, an AI Training Data Contributor aimed at college students at $10 to $15 with 1,100 openings, and a Professional Gamer role at $10 to $14.
A rate at that level is worth checking against the clock before you take it. The relevant question is how long a task takes and whether the time between tasks is paid, which no listing states. Whether this adds up to a living covers what rates do and do not tell you.
What does the work actually involve?
Four kinds of work make up most of the listings.
Video and image annotation. The largest category by openings. Labelling what happens in footage, frame by frame, so a model can learn to recognise it. This is the work behind the 10,000-opening listings.
Document and PDF transcription. Mercor runs a cluster of these for specific languages, including Bengali, Malayalam, Telugu, Gujarati and Odiya, at around $13 an hour, and Korean and Japanese at around $34.
Evaluating model output. Reading what an AI produced and judging whether it is correct, useful or safe. Roles here are titled things like AI Evaluation Specialist, Quality Analyst and AI Agent Power User.
Being a competent user of specific software. This category is easy to miss. Mercor lists roles for people who know Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Unreal Engine or FL Studio, at $30 to $40 an hour. The qualification is fluency in the tool itself. If you have spent years in a creative application, that is the credential.
Speaking another language pays more here
A large share of generalist listings are language-specific, and they are one of the clearer routes in for someone without a professional qualification.
Mercor’s bilingual AI safety roles are priced by language rather than by seniority: Norwegian at $58 to $62, Finnish, Danish and Belgian Dutch at $48 to $52, Ukrainian and Croatian at $38 to $42, Thai at $18 to $22. The rate tracks how hard that language is to source, not how senior the work is.
If you are fluent in a language with few speakers in the AI labour market, that is worth more here than it usually is elsewhere.
What to expect going in
Generalist roles screen faster than specialist ones, and the hiring is done in large waves rather than one seat at a time. That cuts both ways. A 10,000-opening listing means your odds of getting through are far better than they are for a role hiring three people. It also means the project is large, time-boxed and likely to end as a group, which is how contractors describe offboarding waves.
The rates are also the least stable part of this market. Bulk hiring at $50 to $90 reflects present demand for a specific programme, not a floor that will hold.
Where to start
Browse the open generalist roles to see current listings with their stated rates and opening counts, and sort by pay to see the spread for yourself.
If a role sounds too good for the effort involved, how to spot an AI training job scam covers the patterns worth checking before you commit unpaid hours.