The Indian workers filming their work to train AI

Mohammed Ashim has been cutting hair and trimming beards for four years in Bengaluru.

But recently the 22-year old has been strapping a camera to his head to record his work.

The camera only records his hands and fingers - his client's faces are blurred out.

"The routine is simple, but you have to be disciplined about how you move. The operations team taught me that my hands always have to stay cleanly inside the frame, the lighting has to be sharp, and I can't tilt my head too abruptly while working."

He wears the camera for five or six hours a day.

"It's good money, but honestly, the feeling of doing something this futuristic is what keeps me excited. I never imagined my razor techniques would be useful to a global tech company," says Ashim.

He is one of hundreds of thousands of workers across the world paid to record their activities.

Ashim's footage is collected by a local company, which might have hundreds of people filming their work.

That video is then sold on to technology companies and research organisations who use it to train artificial intelligence - in particular so-called physical AI, a type of artificial intelligence that can control robots in the real world.

Rashdan Technologies collects and processes such human generated data.

"Every robotics company, every frontier AI lab, has a specific kind of data they want: industrial tasks, agriculture, household chores, small business work like pottery, garment-making, embroidery, candle-making. We go wherever the task is," says co-founder and CEO Shahil Baig.

His company pays $5 to $10 (£3.74; £7.47) for eight to 10 hours of recorded work.

"For a lot of these people, that's meaningful," Baig says.

Making sure workers give their consent and are comfortable with the process is important, he says.

"We record hands, not faces, and where multi-camera rigs do capture more of the body or environment, we blur faces out. No names, no contact details, nothing that identifies them personally goes into what we hand off."

But his customers are getting more demanding.

"Now clients are asking for four to six cameras rigged around a person's head to cover the entire scene, not just the hands.

"Getting someone to agree to one small camera is one conversation. Getting them to agree to wearing what's effectively a five-camera headset is a completely different, and harder, one. We pay more for that tier of data collection because of what we're asking of people."

And the industry is becoming more crowded, Agarwal expects dozens more competitors to emerge in India this year.

Why is such data so important?

If you want robots to navigate the real world, they can't just be trained inside computer simulations, argues Manish Agarwal, the founder of Humyn Labs, which collects and processes human-generated data.

Most of that data comes from video, but sometimes collectors wear hardware on their hands and fingers to capture physical contact.

"Physical tasks require high-quality signals involving limb movements, fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders and dynamic force application. For example: applying the correct grip force so a plastic bottle doesn't crumble versus a steel glass," he says.

And until recently, that data was not available.

"There is no existing internet archive of embodied human activity - no dataset of a kitchen being cleaned, or a car being assembled by hands that know exactly how much force to apply. That data has to be captured from scratch, in the real world, across diverse environments," says Agarwal, whose company has bases in Bangalore and San Francisco.

At the moment his firm has 96,000 data collectors across countries in Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Humyn Labs filters the thousands of hours of video supplied by those collectors, selecting the most useful content. It's then labelled so the AI knows what it is looking at and packaged in a format that can be used by clients.

"You need to source across a variety of factories, a variety of tasks, in different geographies because if you want to build deployment for US factories or US houses, you'd want environments that are a proxy for that. Residential houses in India may not be the right context for building a robotics use case for the US."

But are workers collecting data for machines that will one day do their jobs?

At the moment it's too early to tell says Bino Paul, senior professor at the School of Management and Labour Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai.

For some workers AI might be a useful tool, but robots could automate other jobs, he says.

The problem is that, if machines do start to take over, there will be little workers can do about.

"By the time workers realise what they have participated in, things may have gone too far," he says.

Like many others, he wants governments to regulate AI.

"AI cannot be viewed merely as a technical system. We need to develop a socio-technical system in which ethics is upheld through human agency, ensuring that AI delivers beneficence rather than maleficence."

Despite concerns over where AI is heading, money is still being poured into its development.

Some of that trickles down to workers in India, where there is no shortage of workers prepared to wear a camera for a few dollars a day.

Mohammed Arman has been working in the textiles industry in Bangalore for 10 years.

"Garments stitching and cutting. I know this work so well I could probably do it with my eyes closed. Cloth, thread, needle, machine after 10 years, your hands just know what to do before your mind even tells them," he says.

He has recently started wearing a head-mounted camera that records his work.

"For me, it's simple. This is survival. I have a family back home in Bihar, and every rupee I send back matters. If someone offers me extra money to wear a camera while I do the exact same work I've been doing for 10 years, I'm not going to say no.

"It doesn't cost me anything. I'm already doing the stitching, already doing the cutting. Now I just get paid a little more for it," he says.

While there is demand for such footage it will be collected somewhere.

"India's current role in this industry is largely as a supplier of raw material - people strap on cameras, record themselves doing ordinary tasks, and that footage gets shipped off to labs abroad," Agarwal says.

But he argues the value of that kind of work will quickly become eroded, as more companies compete for collection contracts.

"India can't afford to stay a footage supplier. It needs to move up the value chain: from recording raw video to owning the pipeline that turns that video into something usable - cleaning it, structuring it, validating it, and ultimately setting the standards for what counts as high-quality training data," he says.

For some people collecting data is attractive part time work.

Science teacher Jolly Arifur was looking for work she could do from home that would fit around her young son.

"For the past seven months, I strapped a rig-mounted camera on my head while doing my routine domestic work scrubbing, cooking, sweeping tile floors, and folding laundry."

Arifur, who lives in Guntakal, Anantapur, fits the recording work around her teaching.

"I get paid two to three dollars per hour. If I record three to five hours a day, that's a good amount in hand it's become an extra source of income for me, on top of teaching. I'm managing both honestly, fantastically."