Business
Why hundreds of people in L.A. are strapping cameras on their bodies to do 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 and 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: DoorDash 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.”
Salvador Arciga checks in for work in front of Urth Caffe to collect his headset in January.
(Ronaldo Bolanos / Los Angeles Times)
AI chatbots like ChatGPT learned to converse, make music, generate images, and write code by using all 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.
It is not as readily available online, so the quest to capture data on human movement has given rise to a micro-economy that supplies real-world demonstrations of what some call “physical AI” systems, such as humanoid robots.
“Humans are supplying ground truth, judgment, or structured feedback that models can’t reliably produce on their own yet,” said Jason Saltzman, head of insights at market intelligence firm CB Insights.
Some countries already have “arm farms,” dedicated facilities where hundreds of humans record first-person footage of them opening doors or folding laundry for robotics. In China, there are more than 40 state-owned training centers where humans operate robots wearing virtual reality headsets.
The development of robotic models is a key focus for major tech companies like Tesla and Google, as well as California startups such as Figure AI and Dyna Robotics.
Goldman Sachs forecasts the market for humanoids could reach $38 billion by 2035. Much of that will be led by China, but California is also a growing center of next-generation robotics.
This intense demand is driving significant activity among niche data providers. San Francisco-based Encord, for instance, raised $60 million in February after its physical AI operations revenue increased tenfold in the last year. In the same vein, Meta-backed Scale AI has gathered 100,000 hours of footage for robotics, while its Palo Alto-based competitor Micro1 employs 1,000 people across 60 countries to record household tasks.
The global data collection and labeling market alone could reach $17 billion by 2030, says market intelligence firm Grand View Research.
Critics argue this work is extractive and poorly compensated, especially when these AI systems are being trained to ultimately replace human labor.
Still, in an embattled economy, with rising inflation and growing unemployment, more workers like Arciga are turning to these jobs for quick cash. In some cases, entire families sign up to record video, speech and images for AI training to supplement their income.
“It’s one of the biggest gig economies that is going to exist in the whole world,” said Shahbaz Magsi, co-founder of Sunain, a human data capture startup.
Arciga adjusts the headset to record himself doing housework in Koreatown.
(Ronaldo Bolanos / Los Angeles Times)
Arciga fastens the headset over his black beanie and enables “Do Not Disturb” on his iPhone, before fastening the phone to his head to record.
As he grabs a paper towel to wipe a stain on his stovetop, he narrates what he is doing, as the manager he met at the cafe had instructed him to do. She said it didn’t matter whether he said it in Spanish or English.
“Right now, I am going to use the spray,” he says.
Each task recorded — be it plant watering or kitchen cleaning — has to last between two and 15 minutes.
Instawork, the company that hired Arciga and more than 50 others like him that day, has historically catered to stadiums, hotels, kitchens and other businesses that need temporary workers.
It has also entered the human movement data capture business to leverage its workforce to train and support robotics systems.
Many new startups have begun building custom hardware — cameras and bodysuits — to capture nuances of human movement, pressure, depth of touch and human pose reconstruction for their datasets.
Egyptian immigrants Azzam and Samra Ahmed are padding their savings by performing for bots in their one-bedroom apartment in Pasadena.
They put on wrist and head cameras before preparing dinner.
The wrist camera captures how every muscle moves as they chop vegetables, season and grill chicken and roll up their shawarmas. This level of detail is needed for a robotic model to learn exact hand movements that cannot be caught by the standard human point of view.
Sunain, the human data capture startup, ships these custom wrist cameras to vetted contributors in its network. It has more than 1,400 contributors in Los Angeles, from Culver City and Santa Monica in the west to Pasadena and Los Feliz in the east.
Arciga cleans a kitchen counter while narrating his actions.
(Ronaldo Bolanos / Los Angeles Times)
“The region offers unmatched diversity of homes, lifestyles and people,” said Magsi, CEO of Sunain.
Where Instawork orders scripted movements, Sunain encourages its gig workers to record natural human behavior, including jumping between tasks.
If humans hear a running tap in the bathroom while cooking, they pause cooking to go close the tap before returning to cooking. That’s how robots will be expected to behave in the real world.
“These robots need to understand the context switching that humans do,” Magsi said.
For the Ahmeds, who work during the day as a mechanic and a nail salon employee, life in their apartment has been reshaped by robot training. They watch Netflix, cook and play table tennis wearing their gear. Their parents are shocked to see the couple living their normal lives covered in cameras.
“We are making money off something that we do every single day,” Azzam Ahmed said. “That’s like getting paid for breathing.”
It’s not always easy work.
Some workers complain that receiving calls and messages can interrupt their recordings, and having a phone strapped to their head is uncomfortable. Some complain that their videos aren’t accepted sometimes, so it takes longer than they expect to get the right footage to get paid.
A recent attempt by the Ahmeds to record cooking was disqualified for payment after reviewers found that steam from the dish had blocked the video. Since then, the couple have avoided cooking steamy dishes.
Still, they each earned $1,200 by doing chores they recorded.
“That money goes directly to our savings,” Azzam Ahmed said.
Sunain has expanded its robot data capture to homes in Turkey, Singapore, Canada and Malaysia. The company has 25,000 contributors across 30 countries to work on voice, video and text completion tasks.
Arciga says some of his friends have challenged him to reconsider whether he should be training AI to do what only humans can do. “Sometimes they do tell me, ‘Well, you’re the problem,’” he said.
His response is that new technology always brings fear and change and it also creates new kinds of jobs, like his latest gig, and people will always demand a human connection.
“People will still need people,” he said.
With crude oil topping $100 a barrel, and the average price of gas in the state approaching $5.50 a gallon, every touch of the nozzle is painful for California drivers.
Now, with the Iran war nearing its third week, the soaring costs of energy are rippling through the world’s fourth-largest economy.
While economists say it‘s too early to gauge the long-term impacts on the state, one thing is clear: The higher cost to fill gas tanks is eating into Californians’ disposable incomes — what’s spent to buy food and other necessities, or to go out and have fun — while reducing the income of businesses, also facing higher fuel costs.
“Inflation and affordability have been a big concern for the American public, and the longer this goes on, the greater risk there is of increasing overall inflation,” said Trevor Higgins, senior vice president for energy and the environment at the Center for American Progress. The group released a report this week documenting the inflationary impacts of the war and past conflicts.
The price of a gallon of gas hit $5.37 on Thursday, up 82 cents from a month ago, according to AAA. The state consistently has the highest prices in the nation due to taxes, clean air rules and supply constraints.
Before the start of the war, the California economy seemed poised for strong growth despite a lagging jobs market that has seen multiple employers — including several major tech companies such as Google, Block and Autodesk — slash payrolls by the thousands.
The state’s economy grew at a robust 3.8% annualized rate in the fourth quarter, driven by artificial intelligence investment, the burgeoning aerospace industry and other high-productivity sectors, according to the UCLA Anderson Forecast released early this month.
The report predicted a possible pickup in employment this year, but any prolonged conflict in the Middle East means all bets are off.
The $4.1-trillion state economy is highly diverse, with large logistics, manufacturing and agriculture industries, just to name a few sectors having to absorb higher fuel costs — though defense contractors could well benefit from the war.
Just as the state’s more than 25 million registered drivers are experiencing pain at the pump, the rising cost of diesel fuel is hitting Southern California’s large logistics industry, including truckers reliant on diesel fuel.
The average price of a gallon of diesel was up to $6.21 on Thursday, up $1.17 from a month earlier.
The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the epicenter of the region’s logistics industry, supporting more than 200,000 jobs and contributing $28 billion to the regional economy in 2022. Some 9,000 truckers visit the ports at least once weekly.
“Diesel fuels all supply chains, and so it will affect the truckers who are servicing the ports immediately. This is going to upset a lot of business plans,” said economist Jock O’Connell, international trade advisor at L.A.’s Beacon Economics.
“There’s every hope that it will be wrapped up within a few weeks at most and will return to normal. But for the time being, there’s going to be a war tax imposed on the entire transportation system of the United States,” he said.
The war also has doubled the costs of bunker fuel that powers ships calling on the local ports with goods from Asia, said Ronald Widdows, chief executive of FlexiVan, a chassis supplier for the logistics industry, during a Port of Los Angeles media briefing Thursday.
That is adding $2 million to the costs of every round trip, which is passed on to the importers here in the United States, he said. Importers include big U.S. toy, apparel and other retailers that can pass on the costs to consumers.
It’s also expected that the disruption in Middle East shipping lanes could slow goods bound for Southern California as they back up in Southeast Asian ports — though for now it’s expected to be minimal, Widdows said.
“That will have some knock-on effect on cargo volume if this goes on for very much longer,” he said.
The state’s $61-billion agricultural industry, the largest in the nation, is highly sensitive to diesel costs too.
“The agricultural industry here in California, as well as the rest of the country, uses a lot of diesel. There’s lots of big equipment, whether it’s an almond harvester or some big tractor in a rice field,” said Daniel Sumner, a professor of agriculture at UC Davis.
While diesel costs are already affecting farmers, another threat on the horizon is higher fertilizer costs due to the rising costs of natural gas, a key feedstock in making it, he said.
Sumner noted the new challenges arrive as the industry is still grappling with President Trump’s tariffs, which — though a majority have been struck down by the Supreme Court — prompted retaliatory actions by longtime trading partners.
The surge in fuel prices comes as the state is experiencing what the Anderson report called a “bifurcated” state economy, with the tech and aerospace industries making up for the lagging construction, retail and segments of the leisure and hospitality industries.
Also lagging has been the kind of hiring expected from a growing economy, exacerbated by thousands of job cuts in Silicon Valley, which firms say have been prompted by artificial intelligence investment and disruption.
Hollywood studios have also laid off thousands because of a slowdown in filming, with the recent Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal stirring fears of more.
Just last week, Oakland fintech Block, the parent of Cash App and payment services company Square, cut more than 4,000 workers citing AI.
The national jobs picture isn’t much better. Last week, the Labor Department reported that employers cut 92,000 jobs in February, a month economists had expected would see a 60,000 gain. The unemployment rate rose to 4.4%.
California’s unemployment rate was 5.5% in December, the most recent available data. That is the highest in the nation, but down a tenth of a point since November.
Michael Bernick, a former director of California’s Employment Development Department, said that although it has been too soon for the war to affect employment, the inflationary pressures brought by higher fuel costs don’t help.
“California’s job market today is among the most competitive and difficult job markets to find a job in that I’ve seen in over 47 years in the field. So it is not like the California economy is in good position in any case,” he said.
As with any war, though, there’s money to be made, and particularly by the defense industry — a sector of the economy in which California holds an advantage over much of the rest of the nation.
Although multiple legacy defense contractors have moved their headquarters out of the state, it retains significant operations of companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and RTX, formerly Raytheon.
Some defense stocks have surged since the start of the war, while the broader Standard & Poor’s 500 index is down about 3%, including a 1.5% drop on Thursday following threats from Iran’s new leader.
Southern California also has seen a resurgence of the industry in recent years, with dozens of aerospace, defense tech and weapons startups planting their headquarters here.
Among them is Anduril Industries, a Costa Mesa startup that builds drone and other autonomous weapons and last year received a $2.5-billion funding round.
Economist Jim Doti, a professor at Chapman University in Orange, said that despite the negative effects of rising fuel costs and inflation, the state economy should benefit from the war.
“The major reason is that one of the most expensive aspects of the war is the use of missiles that are largely produced in California,” he said. “When you look at the macro impact of a war, generally, wars have positive effects on the economy.”
The university forecast in December that the nation’s real gross domestic product would grow 2% this year — a figure that it is now being revised to 2.2%. That is due to the stimulus effect of an expected $100 billion in additional government spending.
How the war affects the overall state and national economies remains to be seen, with economists not in agreement.
This week, the government reported that inflation rose 0.3% in February, and 2.4% over the last 12 months, higher than the Federal Reserve’s 2% target rate. That lessens the likelihood the central bank will cut interest rates and, coupled with the recent jobs report, raises the prospect of “stagflation” — weak growth and higher inflation.
Oxford Economics this week stayed with its 2.8% growth projection for the U.S. GDP.
The forecast noted that higher energy prices will push up inflation that will weigh on disposable incomes, but that would be offset by larger tax refunds due to Trump’s tax-and-spending bill passed last year.
O’Connell, the trade economist, said California’s defense industry will benefit “to the extent we’ve managed to shoot off a large part of our inventory of our arsenal, and we’ll need to replenish that.”
But, he added, “It’s a narrowly focused benefit.”
A.I. A.I.
A torrent of fake videos and images generated by artificial intelligence have overrun social networks during the first weeks of the war in Iran.
The videos — showing huge explosions that never happened, decimated city streets that were never attacked or troops protesting the war who do not exist — have added a chaotic and confusing layer to the conflict online.
The New York Times identified over 110 unique A.I.-generated images and videos from the past two weeks about the war in the Middle East. The fakes covered every aspect of the fighting: They falsely depicted screaming Israelis cowering as explosions ripped through Tel Aviv, Iranians mourning their dead and American military vessels bombarded with missiles and torpedoes.
Collectively, they were seen millions of times online through networks like X, TikTok and Facebook, and countless more times within private messaging apps popular in the region and around the world.
The Times identified the A.I. content by checking for both obvious signs — such as depictions of buildings that do not exist, garbled text and behaviors or movements that defy expectations — and for invisible watermarks embedded within the files. The posts were also checked with multiple A.I. detector tools and compared with reports from news organizations.
A sophisticated new wave of A.I. tools makes the fakes possible, enabling nearly anyone to create lifelike simulations of war that can deceive the naked eye for little to no cost. Similar content has spread in other conflicts, including the war between Ukraine and Russia. But this war has multiple fronts, and that has led to a proliferation of fake content since the United States and Israel first attacked Iran, according to experts.
“Even compared to when the Ukraine war broke out, things now are very different,” said Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar. “We’re probably seeing far more A.I.-related content now than we ever have before.”
Overall, the A.I. fakes included …
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A.I. 37 fake images and videos falsely depicting active war
5 fake images and videos falsely depicting war preparation
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5 fake images and videos falsely depicting crying soldiers
43 memes and overt uses of A.I.
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The content has become a potent informational weapon for Tehran as it seeks to shake the public’s tolerance for war by depicting scenes of devastation and destruction across the region. The majority of A.I. videos about the war push pro-Iranian views, often to falsely demonstrate its military superiority and sophistication, according to a study of online activity by Cyabra, a social media intelligence company.
“The use of A.I. images of places in the Gulf — being burnt or damaged — becomes more important in Iran’s playbook,” Mr. Jones said, “because it allows them to give a sense that this war is more destructive and maybe more costly for America’s allies than it might actually be.”
In one of the most circulated fake videos found online, a shaky handheld scene seemingly shot from an apartment balcony in Tel Aviv shows the skyline pounded with missiles as an Israeli flag sits in the foreground. The video was viewed millions of times across platforms and was picked up by social media influencers and fringe news websites, according to a review of social media activity by The Times.
The Israeli flag in the foreground was one telltale sign that the video was A.I.-generated, experts said. To generate such videos, creators who use A.I. tools will typically write simple text instructions describing, for example, a shaky handheld video of a missile strike on Israel. The A.I. tools will then often include an Israeli flag or the Star of David to fulfill such a request. Several other A.I. videos included the flag.
There is ample genuine footage of the war being shared online, too, with cellphones and social platforms giving a real-time view of the conflict. Many of those images and videos are more subdued than the scenes made by A.I. tools.
Real footage of missile strikes was often shot from far away, typically at night, with missiles visible as little more than bright lights in the distance. Explosions in real videos are more often shown as plumes of smoke, not as fireballs, with bystanders rushing to film the scene only after the munitions meet their target.
Some A.I. videos and images, by contrast, have falsely depicted war like an over-the-top Hollywood action movie, with enormous explosions resulting in mushroom clouds, sonic booms that ripple across unnamed cities and supposed hypersonic missiles that leave glowing streaks in the sky. Real footage is sometimes enhanced by A.I. tools to make explosions appear larger and more devastating, further blurring the line between what is real and fake.
The A.I. footage has essentially created an alternate reality more suited to social media, experts said, where the exaggerated footage is more likely to find an audience.
In one instance, the A.I. fakes played an outsize role in the debate online and between governments over the fate of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier deployed to the region. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy initially suggested on March 1 that they had successfully attacked the ship, possibly sinking it. That led to a deluge of A.I.-generated fakes depicting the ship or those like it on fire. Iranian users celebrated the footage online as evidence that their country’s counteroffensive was rattling the U.S.-Israeli alliance.
The United States later said that the attack was unsuccessful and that the ship was unharmed.
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Dozens of other A.I. images and videos made no effort to hide that they were fake, acting instead as a new form of digital propaganda that brought to life the political arguments typically made by governments or their propaganda arms. Those included flattering depictions of world leaders as powerful men, or dehumanizing depictions of opposition leaders.
One collection of clearly fictional videos offered a view of the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, which was destroyed by the United States in an apparent errant missile strike on Feb. 28, according to a preliminary inquiry. At least 175 people were killed, most of them children, according to Iranian officials.
The A.I.-generated videos unfolded like short films, showing school girls playing outside before an American fighter jet launches missiles.
Social media companies have done little to combat the scourge of A.I. videos that overwhelmed their platforms last year after OpenAI released Sora, a video-generating app that allowed anyone to create realistic fakes through a simple app. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Though videos generated by many A.I. tools can include both visible and invisible watermarks labeling them as fake, those are easy to remove or obscure. Only a few of the videos identified by The Times contained such watermarks.
Elon Musk’s X, which has taken a broadly permissive approach to allowing misinformation on its platform, announced last week that it would suspend accounts from receiving revenue from the platform for 90 days if they posted A.I.-generated content of “armed conflict” without labeling it as such, in a bid to stop users from profiting off the falsehoods.
But many of the Iranian-linked accounts identified by Cyabra appeared far more focused on spreading its messages than making money.
“This is a natural front for Iran to try and exploit and it feels like this is one of the reasons it is so voluminous,” said Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution studying foreign policy and A.I. “It’s actually a tool of war.”
Victoria Gardens, an expansive outdoor shopping center in Rancho Cucamonga, has sold for $530 million as open-air malls continue to outdraw conventional indoor centers.
The center, built in 2004 on former agricultural land at a cost of $285 million, is one of the largest regional malls in Southern California, with more than 30 buildings on 12 blocks, interspersed with parks, gardens and fountains. It also has a public library and cultural center.
The new ownership is a venture led by Newport Beach real estate company Redwood West and Panattoni, in partnership with Prime Finance and Prism Places.
Victoria Gardens gets nearly 15 million visitors annually and generates more than $1,100 per square foot in retail sales, placing it among top-grossing open-air shopping centers in the nation, Redwood West said.
It has about 160 retailers including Apple, Lululemon, Chanel, Gorjana, Sephora, Nike, Zara, AMC Theatres, Shake Shack and Macy’s.
“We see tremendous opportunity with Victoria Gardens,” John Pomer, a managing partner at Redwood West, said in a statement. “It is a one-of-a-kind, highly productive asset with deep roots in the region.”
The new owners said they will spend another $50 million on improvements, such as landscaping, signage and common area upgrades.
When it was built, the mall was part of a trend among commercial builders to create mini downtowns for cities that lacked them.
Town Center Drive in Santa Clarita and Birch Street Promenade in Brea are smaller examples of the town center concept that dates to the early 1990s, after the success of Reston Town Center in Virginia.
The seller of the mall was Brookfield Properties, a Canadian real estate giant that has been selling commercial properties in Southern California in recent years, including office buildings in downtown Los Angeles and the Shoppes at Carlsbad mall in San Diego County.
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