New Delhi: An AI firm has been going around knocking on doors in New York City and making an offer most can’t refuse — ‘Can we clean your house for free?’ But, of course, the service is not entirely free of charge, as the workers will record the whole process to later train cleaning robots.
The company behind the idea is German startup MicroAGI, who announced the service, called ‘Shift’, on 28 May.
“Today, we’re launching shift. We’re starting by cleaning your apartment in New York City, for free,” the firm wrote on X.
“In exchange, we record the cleaning. Robotics is being built on data about how people do daily tasks, and the value of that recording is what funds the service. Anything personal in it is anonymized before the recording is processed,” the post read.
The process is simple. Go to the Shift website, enter your address and book a cleaning service. A person will arrive at your doorstep with a camera mounted on his head. As he cleans your toilet seat, mops the floor, and does dishes, everything will be filmed, and the data will be later processed to train the “next generation of household robots”.
“You get a spotless apartment. We get training data. Everyone wins,” the firm says on its website.
MicroAGI is not the first AI firm to come up with the idea. Other companies have been paying industrial workers and homemakers to record their daily job through a head-mounted camera and send the footage to the firm. The data is then used to ready robots that people fear would eventually replace them.
Several videos of camera-clad workers from India have been posted on social media lately. In Chennai, Tamil Nadu, 25-year-old Sriramyachandra earns Rs 250 by recording mundane activities like peeling and slicing mangoes.
“Who else will give you 250 rupees an hour just for doing housework?” she told AFP, adding, “I may get a robot myself in the future”.
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‘Nothing is free’
Immediately after the Shift service was announced, many raised privacy concerns.
“This is so freakin’ creepy. Don’t people understand that nothing is free?” a person wrote on X.
Another said, “Nothing is free. People are being taken advantage of. You should be paying them. Their data is more valuable than that, and you know it. Unscrupulous corrupt AI corporations like yours are evil.”
“When a service is “free” it means you are the product,” a person quipped.
However, Bercan Kilic, Shift’s founder, insists that they are honest with what they intend to do with the data.
“If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to. We don’t expect everyone to like it and that is fine,” he told BBC.