There's a reason why the grid of images that pops up online, when you're trying to gain access to a website or 'prove that you're human', makes you identify motorcycles, buses or zebra crossings. Your labour of picking the right image is being used to train the AI that will drive driverless cars. Our email messages are probably used to train AI that provides auto-complete. The fact is that all around digital space, what we do, and how we do things, are used to train AI.
Pronto, a home services startup founded in 2025 by Anjali Sardana, is running a pilot where workers wear cameras inside customers' homes. Pronto's investor Glade Brook Capital describes the footage as training data for physical AI and robotics systems. This has made people uncomfortable with the idea.
