{"id":745398,"date":"2026-07-05T23:09:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T23:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/745398\/"},"modified":"2026-07-05T23:09:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T23:09:20","slug":"the-humans-training-their-ai-replacements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/745398\/","title":{"rendered":"The humans training their AI replacements"},"content":{"rendered":"

In April, the race to develop and roll out truly autonomous Artificial Intelligence<\/a> (AI) seemed to enter a disturbing new phase when viral videos surfaced showing human workers wearing headsets featuring cameras that were tracking their movements.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve become accustomed to AI systems scraping vast amounts of data from the internet to train, improve and update themselves. But, as demand for increasingly sophisticated robots that can operate in the physical world grows, human workers are being co-opted to train their own replacements<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In India\u2019s garment manufacturing industry, a firm called Egolab AI supplied manufacturer Pearl Global Industries with headsets for its staff to wear. As the workers were stitching, folding, handling cloth and making the tiny adjustments to the items they worked on, a machine watched, hoovering up training data.<\/p>\n

According to reports, workers had been told the devices would record what they did during their shifts, but had not been asked for written or verbal consent.<\/p>\n

The principle is called capturing \u201cegocentric video footage\u201d, which can be used as training data for humanoid robots. It brings us closer to the industrial ideal of so-called \u201cdark\u201d or \u201clights-out\u201d factories, which can run with very few humans (or none at all), because the machines have replaced workers in every part of the manufacturing process.<\/p>\n

In north-east China, carmaker Zeekr<\/a> is one example of this kind of lights-out manufacturing. Vehicles roll off a heavily automated line without a human hand touching them. The International Federation of Robotics said China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, 54 per cent of the global total, showing how quickly the country is trying to automate its manufacturing base.<\/p>\n

\"Robotic<\/p>\n

Chinese car maker Zeekr runs a \u2018dark\u2019 factory where machines have replaced workers in almost every part of the manufacturing process – Kevin Frayer<\/p>\n

Closer to home, one of the world\u2019s biggest companies is apparently trying to do something similar for office work. In late April, Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced internally that it was testing a tool called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), which would run on US-based company devices and capture mouse movements, clicks and keyboard inputs \u2013 as well as occasional screenshots \u2013 to help build so-called \u201cagentic\u201d AI systems that can work without oversight.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work,\u201d the internal announcement claimed. The programme has not yet been implemented in the UK or Europe because of stronger workplace protections and data-protection rules.<\/p>\n

But, even with that geographically limited rollout, the response within Meta was hugely negative. \u201cIt\u2019s totally digital surveillance. It\u2019s mining your work and your data to find a way to replace you,\u201d says one former employee who was made redundant from the company in May along with 8,000 or so others, accounting for around 10 per cent of the total Meta workforce<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people internally were very upset about it, and were speaking up about how this is the wrong choice,\u201d adds the ex member of staff, who wishes to remain anonymous. In fact, more than 1,500 Meta employees signed a petition against the MCI, saying that \u201ccollecting and repurposing this kind of data raises serious concerns around privacy, consent, and trust in the workplace.\u201d<\/p>\n

The petition also alleged that the initiative was \u201cintrusive, coercive, non-consensual data collection\u201d. And, addressing Mark Zuckerberg and Meta leadership directly, added: \u201cIt should not be the norm that companies of any size are permitted to exploit their employees by non-consensually extracting their data for the purposes of AI training. AI meant to serve and empower people cannot do so while disregarding or disrespecting the consent of the people it claims to serve.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Meta's<\/p>\n

Mark Zuckerberg, whose company, Meta, sparked a row earlier this year when it introduced technology to record employees\u2019 keystrokes, clicks and mouse movements – Laure Andrillon\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Asking staff to grant permission to a tool to track their every digital movement in order to help better train AI systems that are in turn designed to ultimately replace them was seen as beyond the pale for most employees.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels gross to be monitored like that,\u201d the former employee says. \u201cHow would you feel in the workplace if your every keystroke, and every movement, was tracked and recorded to create this product?<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s be real. They want to create a product that they can sell to others that says, \u2018You can make your human employees dispensable.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking to Reuters after the plans were first revealed, a Meta spokesman emphasised that the system was not being used to monitor the performance of staff, but said: \u201cIf we\u2019re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them \u2013 things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating drop-down menus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meta paused the programme at the end of June after learning that unauthorised individuals within the company were able to access the data collected.<\/p>\n

Despite that, experts have warned this is the direction of travel within many industries. That doesn\u2019t bode well for innovation. As the former Meta employee explains: \u201cPeople have asked me, do I actually think that AI can replace the work that I do, and the honest truth is, no. This is a technology that, like many technologies, can accelerate certain repetitive tasks, but fundamentally \u2013 and I worked on these internal systems \u2013 it\u2019s a probabilistic model. It doesn\u2019t do critical thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Catherine Flick, an AI ethicist at the University of Staffordshire, puts it: \u201cThese sorts of systems are trained on existing data, and so therefore they\u2019re just a mirror on things that have already happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Women<\/p>\n

Women with GoPro cameras collect \u2018egocentric data\u2019 while they work inside a factory in Tamil Nadu, India – R.Satish Babu<\/p>\n

The backlash to Meta\u2019s initiative created another, unforeseen, problem for the company: as well as the petition, signed by more than 1,500 staff, some employees boasted on business social networks that they were deliberately making errors in their work, or working in an intentionally lackadaisical manner, in order to feed the AI model bad training data.<\/p>\n

Whether such actions could meaningfully impact the model\u2019s capabilities is yet to be seen. But the decision by a Silicon Valley giant to roll out such a programme is itself a sign of a new workplace norm in the AI era. Where Meta leads, others are likely to follow.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the message that I want to share,\u201d says the ex-employee. \u201cSooner rather than later, it\u2019ll not just be Meta employees or tech workers affected by this, but anyone who is a knowledge worker.\u201d They call it a \u201cwake-up moment\u201d.<\/p>\n

And even if, like the ex-staff member, an individual thinks AI will never be able to do their job as well as they can, that may not be the view of their boss. \u201cThis is a trend that is really concerning for your own livelihood,\u201d adds the ex-employee. \u201cI think a lot of skilled knowledge workers, especially in tech, but in other places, think that, somehow, they have skills that are special and not replaceable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Flick adds that it is also \u201ca really egregious thing for companies to do\u201d.<\/p>\n

But, says the ex-employee, bosses have already shown they do not value human labour in manufacturing industries and other sectors. \u201cWhy would you think that that\u2019s not [going to be] the case for engineers or writers or data scientists?\u201d Ultimately, the ex-staff member says, \u201cwe\u2019re all dispensable to the handful of billionaires\u201d who control the new systems.<\/p>\n

Try full access to The Telegraph free today. Unlock their award-winning website and essential news app, plus useful tools and expert guides for your money, health and holidays.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In April, the race to develop and roll out truly autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI) seemed to enter a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":745399,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,11047,181,507,320051,96661,320052,74,93457],"class_list":["post-745398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-training","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-factory-workers","tag-industrial-robots","tag-mouse-movements","tag-technology","tag-training-data"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=745398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/745399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=745398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=745398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=745398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}