The Download: home robot surveillance, and problematic AI text

In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles--including a particularly revealing shot of a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sitting on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh. The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot's Roomba J7 series robot vacuum, the company which Amazon recently acquired for $1.7 billion in a pending deal. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label data used to train artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, MIT Technology Review obtained 15 screenshots of these private photos, which had been posted to closed social media groups.