By Guardian staff reporter
Publication Date: 2026-03-21 14:00:00
OOne morning last year, Jacobus Louw set out for his daily walk around the neighborhood to feed the seagulls he finds along the way. Except this time, he took several videos of his feet and the view as he walked across the sidewalk. The video earned him $14, about 10 times the national minimum wage, or, for Louw, a 27-year-old from Cape Town, South Africa, half a week’s worth of groceries.
The video was for an “Urban Navigation” task that Louw found on Kled AI, an app that pays contributors to upload their data, such as videos and photos, to train artificial intelligence models. Within a few weeks, Louw earned $50 by uploading pictures and videos of his everyday life.
Thousands of miles away in Ranchi, India, Sahil Tigga, a 22-year-old student, makes regular money by giving Silencio, which crowdsources audio data for AI training, access to his phone’s data…
