I Tried DoorDash’s Tasks App and Saw the Bleak Future of AI Gig Work | WIRED

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The flash from my iPhone camera illuminates my dirty socks and underwear as I hold each item up for the video recording to capture clearly. As I load my smelly clothes into the washer, I tremble a bit each time the phone loudly beeps, detecting that my hands may be out of frame. Gotta see those fingers! No, I haven’t pivoted to filming some kind of fetish content to make ends meet—I’m trying the latest gig work app from DoorDash, called Tasks.

The new Tasks app from food delivery app DoorDash has nothing to do with delivering food—it’s all about gathering training data from humans, that’s you, for improving generative AI models and humanoid robots. “This data helps AI and robotic systems understand the physical world,” reads DoorDash’s press release. “Pay is shown upfront and determined based on effort and complexity of the activity.” Most of the gigs involve strapping a smartphone to your chest and recording your hands performing specific tasks.

This kind of video data can be used by developers of AI models and robotics to improve performance. For example, thousands of videos of people folding laundry, with their hands clearly visible, could help teach a robot how to do the same task using computer vision.

Photograph: Reece Rogers

DoorDash plans to expand this service to include an even wider range of tasks and users in the future. It’s unclear where exactly the app is available for users at launch in the US—residents of California, New York City, Seattle, and Colorado are explicitly blocked from using Tasks. (I was able to use the Tasks app and complete gigs while residing in Kansas.)

Curious about what kinds of tasks DoorDash is offering right now, I signed up to be a “dasher” and downloaded the Tasks app. After logging in, the onboarding quest was to film yourself moving three objects across a table. Easy! I turned the camera on and shifted my coffee cup, pen, and laptop from one side of my desk to the other. My reward for this wasn’t cash—DoorDash shipped a free body-mount for my smartphone camera afterward, so I could complete more gigs in the app.

After that quick onboarding session, I could see the full list of potential jobs and start making some cash. The gigs currently available in the Tasks app mainly fall into five major categories: household chores, handiwork projects, cooking food, location navigation, and foreign language conversations.

The tasks within these categories are fairly broad. The chore list includes everything from making a bed and loading a dishwasher to repotting plants and taking out the trash. The handiwork projects range from simple tasks, like changing a lightbulb, to more complex ones, like pouring cement. The cooking gigs mostly revolve around eggs: frying them, poaching them, scrambling them. Navigation gigs include exploring a museum and walking around an apartment complex. For the language-based tasks, the app requests “natural conversations” in Russian and Mandarin Chinese, as well as other languages.

Courtesy of DoorDash

Each task has its own requirements and an overarching set of rules laid out by DoorDash. These include things like not recording minors, personal data, or anything illegal, and always asking for consent before filming anyone else. DoorDash also has a list of prohibited filming locations, like hospitals, schools, prisons, airports, and military bases.

The first task I attempted was loading my laundry into the washer. I’ve been putting it off all week anyway, so there was a hefty pile of clothes to pick up. This task required a body mount, which hadn’t arrived in the mail yet, so I just held my phone in landscape mode and grabbed the laundry with my free hand. Each article of clothing needed to be individually picked up, held in front of the camera, and then dropped into the wash.

This task paid $15 an hour, with a max time of 20 minutes. It was simple, but I was annoyed each time the phone made a beeping sound, indicating that my hands weren’t visible enough in the frame. That happened sometimes when a piece of laundry was covering my fingers. Even moving slowly, I was able to load the washer with 10 articles of clothing in about a minute and a half. The Tasks app estimated that I would make $0.37 for this video.

After seeing all the different tasks regarding eggs, I needed to try one of those next. The egg tasks paid the same rate as the laundry ones. I had to make sure my hands and the eggs were completely visible the whole time, as well as record from cracked to cooked without stopping. “Hold final egg state steady,” read the instructions. Even if I stretched out this task to the point of burning the egg, the most I could earn was $5. I gobbled it down when finished.

By this time, it was the early afternoon. After being cooped up in the house all day, performing tasks for my AI gig boss, it was time to get some fresh air. So, I picked a navigation tas