Videos show how Indian factory workers have to record their work steps with a camera mounted on their forehead. This data is intended to feed artificial intelligence.
April 18, 2026, 6:58 p.mApril 18, 2026, 6:58 p.m
Screenshot from a new social media video showing workers in an Indian textile factory. The authenticity of this clip is not confirmed – but the development shown is.Image: Screenshot Instagram
The question of how big a threat artificial intelligence poses to human work concerns many people. And their fears are unlikely to be made any less by videos like those currently being seen on social media.
A new clip shows an armada of Indian workers in a textile factory, sitting in front of sewing machines. What immediately catches the eye: You have a headband on which a camera is mounted. The end of the film comments on the scene in Hindi: “Everyone is carrying a camera.” Although the authenticity of the video has not been confirmed, it shows a development that can be seen in other, verified recordings: employees who have to film their manual work in order to feed the artificial intelligence (AI) with the data.
Because if the AI systems are sufficiently well trained, robots can take on such repetitive work. The ethical questions that arise were also picked up by international media. An AI expert who works in one CNN report For example, those who have their say believe that the affected employees do not understand why they have to wear the cameras and that they are thereby contributing to the abolition of their jobs. He demands more transparency from companies.
But even with this transparency, it is questionable whether the employees, who often receive extremely low wages, would be able to defend themselves against their employers’ demands. Recently there have been repeated violent protests in India because of low salaries and poor working conditions.
In fact, the robot offensive has even created new job profiles. Many AI companies are currently hiring people all over the world on an hourly basis to film their rudimentary household work – also with a camera on their forehead.
So the hourly wage earners take up the activity of their hands scrubbing the kitchen surfaces, mopping the floor, cutting onions or potatoes. It is now a multi-billion dollar sector, reports CNN. The reason: It would take countless hours of filming to train the AI robots perfectly so that they can later be put on sale.
“Manufacturing, factory warehouses, retail, nursing homes, hospitals – you will need this type of data in practically every environment, and that is because the movement processes are different everywhere,” says Arian Sadeghi, vice president of Silicon Valley company Micro1, told the US news channel. Micro1 began recruiting its own armada of film ends last year. You are expected to provide at least 10 hours of material each week.
Micro1 is based in Palo Alto, California. But the 4,000-person “film crew” for robot data collection is located in 71 countries. The company receives over 160,000 hours of video material for analysis every month. In February, the US AI chip manufacturer Nvidia announced that it also wanted to use such film footage so that robots could, for example, roll up T-shirts, sort playing cards or unscrew a bottle cap.
For well-heeled people with secure jobs, these robots will at some point provide welcome relief in the household – and bring a lot of money into the coffers of futuristic entrepreneurs like Elon Musk. Skeptics, on the other hand, expect mass layoffs in numerous professional fields or, in the worst case, even fear “Terminator” scenarios – with robots taking control of humanity. (aargauerzeitung.ch)