I Tried DoorDash’s Tasks App and Saw the Bleak Future of AI Gig Work

The flash from my iPhone camera illuminates my dirty socks and underwear as I hold each item up for the video recording to capture clearly. As I load my smelly clothes into the washer, I tremble a bit each time the phone loudly beeps, detecting that my hands may be out of frame. Gotta see those fingers! No, I haven’t pivoted to filming some kind of fetish content to make ends meet—I’m trying the latest gig work app from DoorDash, called Tasks.

The new Tasks app from food delivery app DoorDash has nothing to do with delivering food—it’s all about gathering training data from humans, that’s you, for improving generative AI models and humanoid robots. “This data helps AI and robotic systems understand the physical world,” reads DoorDash’s press release. “Pay is shown upfront and determined based on effort and complexity of the activity.” Most of the gigs involve strapping a smartphone to your chest and recording your hands performing specific tasks.

This kind of video data can be used by developers of AI models and robotics to improve performance. For example, thousands of videos of people folding laundry, with their hands clearly visible, could help teach a robot how to do the same task using computer vision.

Photograph: Reece Rogers

DoorDash plans to expand this service to include an even wider range of tasks and users in the future. It’s unclear where exactly the app is available for users at launch in the US—residents of California, New York City, Seattle, and Colorado are explicitly blocked from using Tasks. (I was able to use the Tasks app and complete gigs while residing in Kansas.)

Curious about what kinds of tasks DoorDash is offering right now, I signed up to be a “dasher” and downloaded the Tasks app. After logging in, the onboarding quest was to film yourself moving three objects across a table. Easy! I turned the camera on and shifted my coffee cup, pen, and laptop from one side of my desk to the other. My reward for this wasn’t cash—DoorDash shipped a free body-mount for my smartphone camera afterward, so I could complete more gigs in the app.

After that quick onboarding session, I could see the full list of potential jobs and start making some cash. The gigs currently available in the Tasks app mainly fall into five major categories: household chores, handiwork projects, cooking food, location navigation, and foreign language conversations.

The tasks within these categories are fairly broad. The chore list includes everything from making a bed and loading a dishwasher to repotting plants and taking out the trash. The handiwork projects range from simple tasks, like changing a lightbulb, to more complex ones, like pouring cement. The cooking gigs mostly revolve around eggs: frying them, poaching them, scrambling them. Navigation gigs include exploring a museum and walking around an apartment complex. For the language-based tasks, the app requests “natural conversations” in Russian and Mandarin Chinese, as well as other languages.