Food delivery app company DoorDash has revealed a new way for couriers to make money.
In a blog post on Thursday, the company introduced DoorDash Tasks, a method for users to earn cash by feeding its artificial intelligence systems.
‘These are the kinds of real-world problems we’ve been solving for over a decade.’
The tasks range from innocuous to voluntarily intrusive. DoorDash listed example tasks like taking photos of a restaurant’s food to help showcase the menu to customers, photographing a hotel entrance so future couriers know the drop-off location, or even helping a delivery bot that may have tipped over or otherwise lost its way.
At the same time, DoorDash said it was piloting a new stand-alone app for users to “complete activities like filming everyday tasks or recording themselves speaking in another language.”
According to a report by Bloomberg, this more specifically refers to users filming themselves doing household chores like washing dishes, loading a dishwasher, or folding laundry.
The audio and video thus captured will reportedly be used to train DoorDash’s AI models as well as the company’s partners’. This likely means that data will be sold or shared to partners in the reported sectors: retail, insurance, hospitality, and technology.
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An example of a paid video submission’s instructions, cited by Bloomberg, included a dishwashing task that asked the worker to use a body camera pointed down toward the hands as the worker scrubbed and rinsed at least five dishes. The user was asked to hold each clean dish steady in the frame for at least a few seconds.
This could be used to train a robotics firm’s robot slave army to recognize certain objects from a specific point of view.
DoorDash showcased an image of a sample task, which included going to a local grocery store to take pictures of the current stock on the shelves.
“It’s simple: you can’t deliver to a door you can’t find or get someone milk if you don’t know what’s on the shelf,” said Ethan Beatty, DoorDash’s GM of tasks.
“These are the kinds of real-world problems we’ve been solving for over a decade, and we realized the same capabilities that helped us could help other businesses too. The goal of Tasks is to help more businesses understand what’s happening on the ground and gather new insights, all while giving Dashers a new way to earn on their own terms,” Beatty added.
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Pay is shown up front for the tasks and is determined based on the required effort and complexity of the job.
The tasks, and their accompanying app, are currently available only in some areas in the United States. California, New York City, Seattle, and Colorado are excluded.
DoorDash said that since 2024, more than 2 million tasks have already been completed.
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