AI Company Cleans NYC Apartments for Free, Raising Data Privacy Concerns

Picture this: a team of camera-clad cleaners and a private chef show up at your home. You are not part of a reality TV show, and have not woken up in an Aldous Huxley or Margaret Atwood novel. Instead, you are a resident of New York City, where AI companies are sending free cooking and cleaning staff straight to people's doors.

But, there is a catch: this AI company is gathering data to train the next generation of cooking and cleaning robots, and every inch of your apartment is now being recorded. The initiative, dubbed Shift by AI firm Micro AGI, is part of a growing number of companies developing the next generation of autonomous robots, which tech bosses hope will be able to do everything from the washing up to serving as live-in personal carers. At my apartment on New York's Upper East Side, I am greeted by two mid-twenties college graduates who have bounced around the start-up world and were looking for work.

Because demand for the free cleans is so high, they are stationed in New York indefinitely, cleaning around five apartments a day, five days a week. The only difference between these guys and a regular cleaner is they have built-in cameras attached to their caps, connected via a lead to their mobile phones. The main aim of the offer is to perform tasks requiring dexterity, to train the robots of the future to use their hands.

As a result, the cleaners were intensely focused on their hands while carrying out the job. Bercan Kilic, Shift's founder, told the BBC the goal of the data-gathering exercise is "to advance humanity". He pointed to existing AI models such as ChatGPT, which are able to create sentences based on previously written passages of text available online.

But he said every kitchen, living room and tool is slightly different, so robots will need to be trained to adapt to being in different spaces and using different items. The biggest difficulty, Kilic said, is that to work, its cleaners will need to collect "tonnes" of data. "In the real world, every object is different, the lighting is different and nothing is the same as it was a couple of hours earlier.

Models need to learn how their hands, cameras and environments work together," he said. The company's business model relies on it being able to sell the valuable data it gathers from inside people's homes, anonymised, to robotics and other AI companies to train robots. Eventually, Kilic said Shift could offer free or discounted services covering "any skill humanity can demonstrate", noting that as well as cleaning apartments in New York, the company also has mechanics fixing cars in Turkey.

There appears to be no limit to what humanoid robots will one day be able to do, and the BBC has also reported on the development of robots to help human soldiers on the battlefield. Data and privacy experts warned consumers to be wary of offering up their data - especially access to their homes - in exchange for purportedly free services. Rory Mir, director of open access and tech community engagement at campaign group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said it has seen a "concerning increase in 'pay-for-privacy' and 'data-bribing' practices from companies".