00:01For factory worker Ravi Kumar, wearing a camera has become just another part of the job.
00:07As he works, it records every movement he makes, from picking up tools to producing auto parts.
00:13But the camera isn't just recording his work.
00:17It's helping train artificial intelligence systems.
00:21They're recording our work to prepare and train a robot,
00:24which is making us a bit worried, as it will affect our work.
00:27It will not only impact the work we do here, but it will mean job losses.
00:34Ravi's concern is shared by many workers here.
00:38The factory pays its workers about one euro an hour to record their work,
00:43on top of their regular wages.
00:45But that small bones comes at a cost.
00:48Workers say the cameras have brought a new kind of anxiety to the factory floor.
00:54When the camera is on your head, you fear making mistakes.
00:57We always feel that if the employer watches the recording, our mistakes may get caught.
01:03The camera has taken away some of the freedom we had to work without fear or pressure.
01:11The man behind this project is factory owner Rahul Jaswani, who oversees the recordings as part of a growing business.
01:18But Jaswani, the workers fearful of losing their jobs are not his immediate concern.
01:24He sells these first-person recordings to companies building humanoid robots.
01:28For him, it's simple.
01:30Workers training AI is a win for the factory.
01:34I'm excited about AI technology.
01:37It will increase productivity in my factory and bring more efficiency.
01:40There will be fewer mistakes in what we produce.
01:43Also, it will be very profitable for us.
01:45It is very good for business in the long term.
01:48That's why I'm very excited about these humanoid robots
01:50and that they'll be coming to India and that they should be deployed in our factories.
01:54In April 2026, this video of textile workers at a factory on the outskirts of Delhi was among the first
02:01to go viral.
02:02It sparked a debate over whether workers are helping train AI models that could one day replace them.
02:09In the weeks since, similar videos have spread across social media,
02:12showing Indian workers filming themselves at factories and construction sites.
02:17One company turning that footage into a business is Labeler AI.
02:21It's this firm that extracts and processes the data from the factory while Ravi works.
02:27The company turns hours of video into training data by identifying and tagging every single action.
02:33It then sells that data to AI companies, mostly in the United States.
02:38AI is moving from digital, digital world where GPT or chat GPT is, to a physical AI.
02:46What I mean by that is like robots are going to be a reality.
02:51They are going to work in the factories, do our work, automate our lot of menial work for us.
02:58And to build those algorithms, the one way to train these robots is to collect humans doing this task by
03:07putting variables on them.
03:10And the demand for this kind of data is booming.
03:13Morgan Stanley estimates the human-eyed robot market could be worth $5 trillion by 2050, with nearly a billion robots
03:21in use worldwide.
03:22In that race, India has become one of the most sought-after places to train them.
03:27We have huge demand. The demand is like, you know, simply to quantify it. It's one billion hours, for example,
03:35over the just next two years.
03:37It needs to be collected to just even make the robots able to at least, you know, start working in
03:44very basic tasks in the factories or warehouses.
03:47That scale-up collection is exactly what concerns Avinash Kumar, a labour economist.
03:52He says the emerging AI economy raises big questions about ownership, profit and fair compensation, questions that remain unanswered.
04:01You see, the workers are facing a double whammy. One is that they are being exploited. They are being taken
04:09away the value that they are generating by converting their human skill into a data set.
04:16And second, that their factory owners are watching and is monitoring every moment of action that they are doing.
04:24So it's a kind of a control regime. It's a surveillance regime that is coming into.
04:28For Avinash Kumar, the law has yet to catch up. He says there is no specific legal framework on how
04:35workplace recordings can be used to train AI.
04:40Back at the factory, Ravi Kumar and his colleagues continue with their daily routine, every moment still teaching the machine
04:48to do their job.
04:50Whether this technology will create new opportunities or replace these workers remains unclear.
04:56What troubles them most, they say, is that right now India has no protections in place for workers training AI.
05:00What troubles them most, they say, is that right now India has no protections in place for workers training AI.
05:02I will tell you by the next.
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