Karur

And while we often hear about the possibility of large language models revolutionizing white-collar work, the jobs this technology is being trained on are much more working class.

NPR's Diya Hadid takes us to a small town in southern India called Karur, where she found people doing housework being enlisted to train A.I.

24-year-old Sneha Jagadish chops a carrot in her kitchen.

It's an ordinary scene in a middle-class home in a small Indian town.

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The demand for this kind of data has created opportunities for Indian companies like Objectways.

It occupies a few buildings on the main street of Karur.

Senior Objectways employee Rajesh Kumar Ramaswamy tells us they pay thousands of people to record themselves working.

Mecca AI pays people to record ordinary activity with body sensors and phones.

A textile worker in Karur described wearing a GoPro while packing aprons.

Those recordings can supply examples for a future robot.

They are not evidence the robot now packs aprons economically.

The final check is what changes for the people in the workflow.

At a textile factory in Karur, Shobha Kirubakaran wore a GoPro while packing aprons.

It recorded her hand movements for robot training.

She said this was the third time she had been asked to wear one.

NPR's Dia Hadid reports on factory workers who are training their own replacements.

In a textile factory in the southern Indian town of Karur, women pack aprons into plastic packaging and record their every hand movement through a GoPro fastened on a headset.

That footage is called egocentric data.

Developers need millions of hours of it to train AI robots.

They say these women in factory jobs might be saved by the fact that their labor is cheap.

Most are paid around a hundred dollars a month, and power here is considered expensive for now.

Dia Hadid, NPR News, Karur, Tamil Nadu, India.

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NPR's Dia Hadid reports factory workers are training their own replacements.

[machinery whirring] In a textile factory in the southern Indian town of Karur, women pack aprons into plastic packaging and record their every hand movement through a GoPro fastened on a headset.

That footage is called egocentric data.

Developers need millions of hours of it to train AI robots.

They say these women in factory jobs might be saved by the fact that their labor is cheap.

Most are paid around a hundred dollars a month, and power here is considered expensive for now.

Dia Hadid, NPR News, Karur, Tamil Nadu, India.

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