Subscribe Sign in

Meet the gig workers helping train robots to do our dishes

1 min read Rewritten in plain language
Show what we removed Rules applied: A3×4 A4×2 A9 D3×6 D4 E3×7 F2×2 all 30 rules
  • Mohamad Dunggio recently strapped a mobile phone to his head and recorded himself doing his dishes over and over again for four hours.
  • Mr Dunggio is one of the thousands of gig workers around the world feeding the robotics industry's insatiable demand for training data.
  • Mr Dunggio said he was paid by three companies from Argentina, India and the US between $US3 and $US10 an hour to record himself performing tasks like dishwashing, cleaning, cooking, making the bed, ironing, folding clothes and sweeping.
  • Dana Kulić, a robotics professor at Monash University, said that for robots to navigate the large variety and complexity of people's homes they needed to learn how to observe and react to their environments.
  • Mr Bruccoleri said the company could collect around 60,000 hours of video per month from as many as 5,000 contributors all over the world, including India, Canada, the US, Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines.

5 sentences from our version of the report, chosen to cover it. Nothing here is written; every line is in the article below. How

Mr Bruccoleri said the company could collect around 60,000 hours of video per month from as many as 5,000 contributors all over the world, including India, Canada, the US, Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines. The company was focused on wealthier countries like the US and Canada, where the robots were likely to be sold initially.

Headline check

There is nothing in this headline a machine can check against the report: no figure, no name and no quotation.

Nothing was measured here, so nothing is claimed. How this is checked

Mohamad Dunggio recently strapped a mobile phone to his head and recorded himself doing his dishes over and over again for four hours.

"I think it's OK because I exchange my time to earn money," said the 23-year-old from Gorontalo on Sulawesi in Indonesia.

Mr Dunggio is one of the thousands of gig workers around the world feeding the robotics industry's insatiable demand for training data.

Since April he has been earning extra cash making "egocentric training" videos, used to teach robots how to do things like household chores.

Mr Dunggio said he was paid by three companies from Argentina, India and the US between $US3 and $US10 an hour to record himself performing tasks like dishwashing, cleaning, cooking, making the bed, ironing, folding clothes and sweeping.

As the recent World Humanoid Robot Games in China showed, robots have been advancing in literal leaps and bounds in recent years.

Dana Kulić, a robotics professor at Monash University, said that for robots to navigate the large variety and complexity of people's homes they needed to learn how to observe and react to their environments.

Professor Kulić said robotics researchers were using egocentric data in a way similar to how generative AI researchers taught large language models like ChatGPT to predict the next word or letter in a sentence.

Mr Bruccoleri said the company could collect around 60,000 hours of video per month from as many as 5,000 contributors all over the world, including India, Canada, the US, Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines.

Shortened to 1 minute of reading, this version reads 5.9 on the Niral Score.

You are reading our version, not theirs. This is ABC News's report shortened to its most important sentences, in plainer words, with verdicts and loaded words taken out. Plain description stays, and so do adjectives that carry a fact, such as "former" or "federal". The reporting, the facts and the quotations are theirs — quotations are never edited — and the indicators beside it measure this version. Hover or tap Adjectives to see every one left in the text.

How this outlet filed it, and how we rewrote it

No other newsroom we read has filed on this event, so there is nothing to compare it with yet.

Outlet Niral ScoreAdjectivesSourcingSentimentHappiness
ABC Newsas they published this story 8.4 22 80 -0.2 49.9
Mundane Readneutralized from ABC News 7.3 22 80 -0.2 49.9

Sign in to react.

Comments

Nothing here yet.

Sign in to comment.

Questions

Readers can ask a question about this story here. Questions and answers are for subscribers. Sign in to read them.

Comments are read before they appear where anything in them needs a person to look. Nothing posted here is ever deleted; a comment taken down keeps its text and the reason, so the decision can be looked at again. How this works