A woman on the bus asked if she could take my picture. Not in a flirty way — she had a clipboard and a laminated badge and the dead eyes of someone working on commission. She said it was for a “visual diversity database.” Fifteen dollars for my face. Five more if I could do some expressions. Surprised. Angry. Sad. Happy.
I told her I could do all four at the same time, but she wasn’t interested in range.
I said no. Not because I have principles — I lost those somewhere between my second marriage and my third eviction — but because my face at this age isn’t worth fifteen dollars to me. It’s worth less. I just didn’t want anyone else making a profit off the decline.
Turns out I’m in the minority. There’s a whole economy of people selling themselves to the machine now, piece by piece, and the going rate is worse than you’d think.
A twenty-seven-year-old in Cape Town named Jacobus films his feet as he walks to feed the seagulls. Fourteen dollars for a video of sneakers on pavement. He uploads it to an app called Kled AI — an “Urban Navigation” task, they call it. He’s teaching a machine how to walk by showing it his own steps. Made fifty bucks in a couple weeks, living his everyday life out loud, every mundane moment now a line item on someone’s training budget.
In Ranchi, India, a twenty-two-year-old student named Sahil holds his phone up in hotel lobbies and intersections, letting an app access his microphone to capture the ambient noise of being alive in a city. Traffic. Restaurants. The hum of a hundred conversations he’s not part of. A hundred bucks a month. Enough for food.
And in Chicago, an eighteen-year-old welding apprentice named Ramelio sold eleven hours of his private phone calls — friends, family, the people who trust him enough to say what they actually mean — to a company called Neon Mobile. Two hundred dollars. His logic was pure American resignation: they’re already taking my data, so I might as well get a cut.
He was right about the first part. The second part is where it gets ugly.
See, the machines are running out of things to eat. They’ve scraped the web clean — every blog post, every forum rant, every recipe and obituary and fan fiction about vampires. The major datasets are locking their doors or charging admission. And when the AI companies tried feeding the machines their own output — synthetic data, the engineers call it — the models started producing what researchers delicately term “error-filled slop.” The snake eating its own tail and choking on it.
So they came for us. Not the us with lawyers and agents and leverage. The us that needs grocery money. The us in Cape Town and Ranchi and the South Side of Chicago, the ones for whom a few dollars in American currency is the difference between eating and not eating this week. That’s the brilliance of it, if you’re the kind of person who finds exploitation brilliant. You find the people who can’t afford to say no and you offer them just enough to make saying yes feel like a decision.
Some professor at Oxford wrote a book called “Feeding the Machine” and said the quiet part out loud: the only winners are the platforms in the global north that capture all the enduring value. The workers are left with no protections, no transferable skills, and no safety net. He could’ve saved himself three hundred pages and just written “same as it ever was” on a napkin.
But the terms of service — that’s where the real art is. When you sign up for these platforms, you grant a license that is worldwide, exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, and royalty-free. Read those words again. Slowly. That’s legal language for: we own this now. Your face, your voice, your laugh, your likeness, your “derivative works” — whatever unholy thing they decide to build from the parts of you they’ve purchased. A twenty-minute voice recording today becomes an AI customer service bot next year, and the person whose throat built it never sees another dime.
An actor in New York named Adam Coy sold his likeness for a thousand dollars to an AI video company. He negotiated protections — no politics, no alcohol ads, no porn. A year later, his friends started forwarding him videos. Millions of views. His face. His voice. Except in the video, his AI replica was calling itself a “vagina doctor” and hawking supplements for pregnant women.
“It felt embarrassing to explain to people,” Coy said.
Yeah. I imagine it did.
The welding apprentice in Chicago, Ramelio — the company he sold his phone calls to went offline a few weeks after launch. A security flaw exposed everyone’s recordings and phone numbers to anyone who knew where to look. The company never told him. He found out on his own. Now he’s wondering where his voice ended up — which server, which product, which stranger’s algorithm is wearing his words like a borrowed coat.
I keep thinking about Jacobus in Cape Town. He has a nervous disorder. Couldn’t get a job for years. The money from selling his daily life to AI let him save up five hundred dollars for a spa training course. He’s becoming a masseur. He’s using the machine that’s swallowing the world to learn how to touch people with his hands.
There’s something in that image I can’t shake. A man selling his steps, his sidewalks, the view from his own eyes — feeding it all into a system that will never know what a seagull sounds like, not really, not the way he does — so he can learn a trade built entirely on the thing machines will never have. The warmth of one person’s hands on another person’s shoulders. The pressure that says: I’m here. You’re real. This is not a simulation.
The researchers say AI companies will exhaust fresh training data by this year. By now. So the hunger gets worse. The price goes up a little, then down a lot, then the demand shifts to something else and the workers scatter like they always do when the mine runs dry.
We’ve done this before. Coal towns. Factory towns. Company towns where they paid you in scrip you could only spend at the company store. The only difference now is that the raw material being extracted isn’t in the ground. It’s your voice. Your face. Your Tuesday night phone call with your mother.
And the company store is an app.
Source: Thousands of people are selling their identities to train AI - but at what cost?