Tech companies are desperate to film you doing chores

This week, I launched an AI training startup called Shift She said she would clean New Yorkers’ homes for free. It has plans to expand to other cities as well, including London, and looking at my apartment, I find that appeal.

But there is a catch. There is always a catch.

In exchange for cleaning, Shift wants footage of its cleaners in action: clearing dishes, wiping tables, dusting tables, and mopping floors. He wants everything. A video of all the boring domestic labor that we’d be happy to outsource if we could — and that robotics companies are racing to teach machines to do it so they can sell us something to do it for us.

This is harder than it sounds. Unlike chatbots, image generators, and other AI tools that have proliferated in recent years, robots have to engage with the physical world. This means understanding space, motion, force, friction, strange shapes and materials, strange lighting, and everything else that humans – and other organic beings – tend to understand instinctively. That’s why things that are generally easy for us, like folding clothes, picking up an apple, or pouring a glass of water, have proven to be crazy things for roboticists to write down.

Teaching machines to do these things requires data. Lots of it. Text, images and videos can easily be extracted from the Internet on an industrial scale. And they were, in many cases, without compensating the people who made them. It is difficult to get rid of the material world, and even more difficult to quietly scrape it away without paying the price. This means that access to high-quality data is a massive bottleneck for companies developing physical AI. It’s a lucrative opportunity, so companies like Shift are getting creative.

They are not alone. in india, Recent reports It revealed that home services platform Pronto uses customers’ homes as a source of training footage for AI to do household chores such as cooking, cleaning and laundry. Pronto says it only records footage if customers explicitly choose to do so — it’s not clear what customers get in return, other than a copy of the footage — but the practice has still sparked a wave of backlash in the market, with rival startups. Insistence They have never signed up for in-home AI training and have no plans to do so.

Other startups are focusing on trying to scale data collection. Based in Silicon Valley Human Archivefor example, is hoping to partner with companies like Pronto and have gig workers record their activities using not-so-stylish camera hats. The hats collect snapshots from the wearer’s point of view, which is exactly the kind of “egocentric” or first-person data robotics companies need to teach machines how to navigate people in physical space. Meanwhile, Shift is also exploiting consumers directly, allegedly paying tens of thousands of people in 15 countries to log their activities through its app.

Some companies are Skip useful work completely. Instead, workers are paid to complete the exact same physical tasks over and over again, while cameras and sensors can capture their every movement. This is amazing Interim data farms It’s designed to turn routine physical activity — folding towels, picking up cups, carrying boxes — into AI training materials valuable enough to justify paying people to create them.

Some of the data is generated by robots that already exist in the world. Despite the hype, true automation is still a ways off – hence the need for all this data – but companies are keen to make it happen. Shipping products anyway. They will use data from customers’ homes to improve the product. Many companies rely on remote workers to step in when robots inevitably malfunction. They will use this data as well.

Of course, the process of trading data for something of value is not new. Companies have been offering discounts, amenities, and free services in exchange for access to your data for years, from loyalty cards and cookies to surveillance cameras, insurance apps that monitor how people drive, and so on. Outrageous smart TV that always shows ads.

What’s new is the type of data companies are willing to pay for. For now, this means that maybe you can let someone clean your house wearing a stylish hat for free, until the company can eventually sell you a robot to do that instead.