The Phenomenon of Submitting Dishwashing Videos to Earn Money: Understand the Potential and Risks Before Taking Part

AI trainer, or artificial intelligence trainer, has recently become a hot topic on social media. One viral example shows a video of someone recording dishwashing activities to earn payment in US dollars from an AI company. At first glance it looks like an ordinary domestic task. Yet the activity is used to help train AI, particularly humanoid robots, to understand human movements in the real world. The phenomenon gained momentum after an Instagram user named Itha Siburian Pandjaitan shared her experience of being paid to record dishwashing activities for the AI company Mindrift. A cybersecurity expert from Vaksincom, Alfons Tanujaya, says this trend has emerged because AI now requires data from the real world. “Until now, artificial intelligence has been fed with existing digital data. But now they need data from the real world,” Alfons told KompasTekno in an interview on Friday, 23 May 2026. According to Alfons, the AI trainer phenomenon shows that AI not only displaces human work but also opens up new professional opportunities. In the midst of a difficult economy and rising living costs, jobs like AI trainer are increasingly seen by some as a new side hustle. Platforms such as Mindrift, Outlier AI, Toloka, Scale AI, and DataAnnotation now offer various types of remote AI training work. These platforms generally recruit freelancers to help train AI models for large tech companies. The pay is also quite lucrative. CBS News reported the average AI trainer earns around $105 per hour, or about Rp 1.7 million. For specialised fields like psychiatry, pay can reach around $350 per hour, or about Rp 5.7 million.