Nagireddy Sriramyachandra spends an hour in her kitchen slicing mangoes, but she is not making a cooking video. Instead, she is helping train artificial intelligence-powered robots.With a smartphone strapped to her head, the 25-year-old records herself carrying out everyday household tasks. The footage is then sent to an AI data company that uses it to teach machines how humans move and work in real-life situations.For every hour of recording, Sriramyachandra earns Rs 250. “Who else will give you 250 rupees an hour just for doing housework?” she said from her home in Chennai. Looking ahead, “I may get a robot myself in the future,” she said as quoted by news agency AFP. She is part of a growing workforce in India helping build the next generation of AI systems. While AI chatbots and image generators rely largely on digital information, robots need to learn how to operate in physical environments. To do that, developers are collecting first-person footage, known as egocentric data, that allows AI models to study human actions.Some workers record videos from their homes, while others work in factories or specialised studios using head-mounted cameras, video glasses and motion sensors.“It blares ‘hands not detected’ when I’m not recording properly,” Sriramyachandra said, describing the recording process.Experts believe demand for such work could continue to grow. The humanoid robot market is expanding rapidly, with projections suggesting that more than one billion robots could be in use by 2050, mainly in industrial and commercial settings.Digital labour expert Aditi Surie of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements said, “It’s likely that these data collection services will increase.”However, the development has also raised concerns about automation and jobs.A report by government think tank NITI Aayog noted that discussions around AI and labour often focus on white-collar workers and predictions of job losses. It argued that “little attention, if any, is paid to how AI can serve India’s 490 million informal workers, the very people who form the backbone of our economy”.The debate is not just happening among experts. It has also spread across social media. One user on X wrote, “It’s like digging your own grave but getting paid minimum wage for it.”Another commented, “They’re building the noose that will hang their jobs. The AI revolution is already eating the developing world from the inside. Is this peak dystopia? Or do we actually want those jobs be taken from us?”One user wrote, “No other country has a population huge enough to generate data at such large scale and sell it for so cheap.”Among those reacting to the story was entrepreneur Ramesh Srivats, who joked: “Why export all this data? An Indian company should do this, and launch an AI robot for household chores. Could call it B.AI.”The joke is a play on the word “bai”, a term commonly used in many Indian households to refer to a domestic helper. The concerns are shared by workers themselves. Ponni, a 55-year-old flower garland maker in Bengaluru who has also participated in AI data collection, worries about what lies ahead.“The next generation … who might have to do work similar to mine, they will face a problem,” she said.For now, the work offers an additional source of income. But as AI technology advances, questions remain over whether the people helping train the machines today could one day find themselves competing with them.
