Showing robots the ropes, step by step

To mimic humans, AI needs data. Strapped with cameras, these gig workers provide it.

- BY NILESH CHRISTOPHER

RONALDO BOLAÑOS Los Angeles Times WEARING A HEADSET, Salvador Arciga records and narrates as he performs routine household chores.

The hottest new gig economy job in Los Angeles is performing at home to help artificial intelligence understand how humans move.

Hundreds of people from Santa Monica to Los Feliz are strapping cameras on their heads and hands as they do chores at home so bots can watch how they make coffee, scrub toilets, water plants and wash dishes.

At a corner table at Urth Caffe downtown, a woman is sitting next to a big black bag. A constant flow of visitors stops by. She slips each a package and instructions, and they move on.

"People think I am selling" drugs, she says.

She's actually a manager for a San Francisco-based firm called Instawork that connects companies with blue-collar workers, and she's handing out headbands with phone mounts, a simple piece of equipment that lets people record their every move — movements that will be turned into data to train robots how to act.

She hands Salvador Arciga a headmount and tells him to go home and do the dishes and clean his kitchen.

He has done odd jobs all over town: Door Dash delivery, handing out hats at Dodger Stadium, washing dishes at Disneyland, hanging holiday lights at the Los Angeles Zoo and more. This job seems relatively easy, and it pays $80 for two hours of footage.

"I need to do chores anyway," he says. "Now I get a chance to get paid to do it."

AI chatbots like Chat-GPT learned to converse, make music, generate imRobots, from A1 ages and write code by using all of the information they could get from the internet.

Now, as AI and robotics companies figure out how to do the same in the physical world, the models need much more information about real-world movements.