tech
Tech companies desperately want to film you doing chores
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TL;DR
- AI startups are paying people for real-world data to train robots, often in exchange for free services like home cleaning.
- Robots require extensive data to understand the physical world, which is more challenging to acquire than digital data.
- Companies like Shift and Pronto are collecting footage of domestic labor, while others like Human Archive use gig workers with camera caps.
- Some companies create 'staged data farms' where workers repeatedly perform simple physical tasks for data collection.
- Data from robots in the field and remote workers assisting them is also used for AI training.
- This practice of trading data for services or value is not new, but the type of data being collected is novel.