This company will clean your apartment for free, to train robots

How would you like to get your home cleaned by professionals without having to spend a single dollar? Sounds too good to be true, right? It kind of is, but it’s also entirely true as long as you’re comfortable with the process being recorded on video and used to train AI and household robots.

Shift is a US company that’s offering to clean apartments in New York City (NYC) for free in exchange for recording the entire cleaning process. In an X post, Shift said it will send professional cleaners to your house equipped with devices to record first-person footage of the service.

It will then use this footage to create and license datasets to train robots and AI on how humans perform everyday tasks. Firsthand recordings and data like this are extremely useful for companies trying to build AI-powered solutions for household chores and daily tasks. It’s also the kind of real-world data that simply can’t be recreated without spending a ton of money. Shift’s solution, therefore, is to spend that money hiring professional cleaners and gather data on how they perform the tasks.

The company claims it will anonymize the footage before processing and licensing it for training purposes, which means any personal information shouldn’t make its way into the training data. Though the recordings are meant to capture a first-person view of the cleaning task, the company specifically states that it will blur any and all personally identifiable information from screens, ID cards, pieces of paper, and even cell phones.

It also claims that the recordings will only be used for training AI and robots and will never be shared publicly or sold to advertisers.

For now, the company is sticking to cleaning apartments in NYC. However, Shift said it’ll soon start offering other free tasks across the globe, including handymen, repairs, and errands — all in exchange for recording the entire process.

It’s certainly a novel approach to gathering data, and one that seems quite popular already. Replies on the company’s X post indicate that several people are interested in the idea. You can book a cleaning on Shift’s website if you’re intrigued by the idea as well.

However, it’s also slightly worrying. Even if Shift’s intentions are to keep your data safe, breaches happen all the time, and I, for one, wouldn’t want videos of my house being all over the internet.