Free Cleaning, Filmed for AI: My Robot-Training Home Experiment

A New York journalist tries Shift’s free housekeeping service, which pays cleaners (and a chef) to visit, while filming the apartment with cap-mounted cameras to train robots. The session, about two hours, yielded basic cleaning plus a surprise three-course lunch; cameras and wires were visible, raising privacy concerns even as Shift says it anonymizes data. The piece situates this as part of a broader trend of paying for home-task videos to train AI, questions the sustainability given the high cost, and ends with a cautious take on the future of robots trained from real-home footage.