flash from My iPhone camera illuminates my dirty socks and underwear and captures each item clearly for video recording. Every time my phone beeped loudly as I put my stinky clothes in the washing machine, I realized my hands were out of the frame and I trembled a little. You have to see that finger! No, I am not dedicated to filming some kind of fetish content for a living. I’m trying out DoorDash’s newest gig work app, Tasks.
Food Delivery App DoorDash’s new Tasks app has nothing to do with food delivery. It’s all about collecting training data from humans, you, in order to improve your generative AI models and humanoid robots. “This data helps AI and robotic systems understand the physical world,” a DoorDash press release says. “Salaries are offered upfront and determined based on effort and complexity of activity.” Most gigs require you to strap your smartphone to your chest and record your hands performing certain tasks.
AI model and robotics developers can use this type of video data to improve performance. For example, thousands of videos clearly showing people’s hands folding laundry could help teach robots how to perform the same task using computer vision.
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Photo: Reece Rogers
DoorDash plans to expand this service to a broader range of tasks and users in the future. It’s unclear where exactly users will be able to utilize the app at launch in the United States, with residents of California, New York City, Seattle, and Colorado explicitly blocked from using Tasks. (I was able to use the Tasks app to complete gigs while living in Kansas.)
I wanted to see what kind of tasks DoorDash currently offers, so I signed up as a “Dasher” and downloaded the tasks app. After logging in, my onboarding quest was to film myself moving three objects around on a table. easy! I turned on my camera and moved my coffee cup, pen, and laptop from one side of the desk to the other. My reward for this was not cash. DoorDash then shipped me a free body mount for my smartphone camera so I could complete more gigs within the app.
After that quick onboarding session, I was able to see a complete list of potential jobs and start earning some cash. Gigs currently available on the Tasks app mainly fall into five main categories: housework, craft projects, food preparation, location navigation, and foreign language conversations.
The tasks included in these categories are quite wide-ranging. The chore list includes everything from making the bed to loading the dishwasher to repotting plants to taking out the trash. Handcraft projects can range from simple tasks like changing a light bulb to more complex tasks like pouring cement. The cooking show primarily revolves around eggs, which include frying, poaching, and scrambling them. Navigation tasks include exploring museums and walking around apartment complexes. For language-based tasks, the app requires “natural conversations” in Russian, Chinese, and other languages.
