The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7 series robot vacuum.Furniture, décor, and objects located high on the walls and ceilings are outlined by rectangular boxes and accompanied by labels like “tv,” “plant_or_flower,” and “ceiling light.” iRobot—the world’s largest vendor of robotic vacuums, which Amazon recently acquired for $1.7 billion in a pending deal—confirmed that these images were captured by its Roombas in 2020.“And they can drive around in your home—and you have no way to control that.” This is especially true, he adds, of devices with advanced cameras and artificial intelligence—like iRobot’s Roomba J7 series.“There’s always a group of humans sitting somewhere—usually in a windowless room, just doing a bunch of point-and-click: ‘Yes, that is an object or not an object,’” explains Matt Beane, an assistant professor in the technology management program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies the human work behind robotics.iRobot has said that it has shared over 2 million images with Scale AI and an unknown quantity more with other data annotation platforms; the company has confirmed that Scale is just one of the data annotators it has used."