00:00For Ravi Kumar, wearing a camera has become just another part of the job.
00:04It records his every move, from picking up tools to producing auto parts.
00:11They're recording our work to prepare and train a robot,
00:14which is making us a bit worried as it will affect our work.
00:18It will not only impact the work we do here, but it will mean job losses.
00:24Ravi's concern is shared by many workers here.
00:26The factory pays them about 1 euro an hour to record their work, on top of their regular wages.
00:34Factory owner Rahul Jaswani sells these first-person recordings to companies developing humanoid robots.
00:41He sees the technological advance as a win for the factory.
00:44I'm excited about AI technology.
00:46It will increase production and efficiency and decrease the number of mistakes.
00:50In April 2026, this video of textile workers went viral.
00:55It sparked a debate over whether workers are helping train AI models that could one day replace them.
01:02Labeler AI is the company that extracts and processes data from the factory where Ravi works.
01:09The firm turns video into training data.
01:11They identify and tag every single action.
01:14The data is then sold to AI companies mostly in the United States.
01:18We have huge demand.
01:21The demand is like, you know, simply to quantify it.
01:24It's one billion hours, for example, over the just next two years.
01:28It needs to be collected to just even make the robots able to at least, you know, start working in
01:35very basic tasks in the factories or warehouses.
01:38Just how much data is collected is what concerns Avinash Kumar, a labor economist.
01:44He says the emerging AI economy raises questions about ownership, profit and fair compensation.
01:51You see, the workers are facing a double whammy.
01:54One is that they are being exploited.
01:57They are being taken away the value that they are generating by converting their human skill into a data set.
02:06And second, that their factory owners are watching and is monitoring every moment of action that they are doing.
02:14So it's a kind of a control regime.
02:16It's a surveillance regime that is coming into.
02:19Ravi Kumar and his colleagues say what troubles them most is that right now India has no protections in place
02:25for workers training AI.
02:28Thank you very much for joining me, patreon.com
02:30Anyway, good news.
02:31You
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