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Uber India Starts Offering Drivers Gigs Collecting and Classifying Info For AI Models (theregister.com)

(Friday September 05, 2025 @11:20AM (msmash) from the might-as-well dept.)


Uber's Indian arm has started using its app to offer rideshare and delivery drivers the chance to make money by [1]classifying data used by AI systems . From a report:

> Megha Yethadka, global head of Uber AI Solutions, revealed the new gigs in a Thursday LinkedIn post in which she said drivers sometimes have downtime during the day or might want to make some extra cash after hours. Yethadka said the work can involve reviewing photos, counting objects, classifying text, recording audio, or digitizing receipts.

>

> She said the gigs are "Powering our enterprise customers worldwide for their gen AI models or consumer applications." "Until now, these tasks were completed by independent contractors outside the app," Yethadka wrote. "The early results are very promising, and we're eager to scale this further." In an accompanying video, she mentioned "worldwide" expansion for the offering. Prabhjeet Singh, Uber's president for India and South Asia, said the gigs are available in 12 cities and that "tens of thousands of drivers" are already performing what Uber calls "digital tasks."



[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/05/uber_india_ai_model_gigs/



Is it like snitching on your user? (Score:2)

by ls671 ( 1122017 )

Is it like snitching and reporting on your users? Seriously asking. I didn't look any further.

Re: (Score:2)

by backslashdot ( 95548 )

No. Seriously answering.

AI (Score:3)

by TwistedGreen ( 80055 )

I knew it, it's all just a mechanical turk

Re: (Score:3)

by backslashdot ( 95548 )

I should have had a clue that ChatGPT was just some Indian guy furiously typing out the answer when at the end it told me to do the needful.

Re: (Score:2)

by spacepimp ( 664856 )

Turk182 has a name. We don't know it but he does.

The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer
and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown
suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged,
I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not
dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the
quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors,
and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural
for them to despise science fiction.
-- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "Science Fiction"