We Paid Users $300K to Upload Their Camera Rolls, Homework, and Dashcam Footage | Hacker News Reader

We Paid Users $300K to Upload Their Camera Rolls, Homework, and Dashcam Footage

kled.ai

13 pointsAvipat_38 comments

Paid in their own crypto… https://x.com/useKled/status/1932778949051838827

We launched Kled 6 weeks ago as a data marketplace for everyday people. Users upload personal content like camera rolls, dashcam footage, homework, POV recordings, and original music, and we pay them for it.

While AI companies scrape public data to train their models, we’re building a platform that compensates users and gives AI labs access to licensed, high-quality data.

The product took off quickly. We did over 20 million impressions on Twitter, more than 10,000 people signed up, petabytes of data were uploaded, and we’ve paid out over $300,000 to users.

Every file uploaded is automatically classified and made searchable so AI companies can instantly license the exact datasets they need.

Over the next five weeks, we’re doubling down on our labeling operations and hiring top AI engineers. We’ve raised over $2 million in venture capital at a $40 million valuation. High pay and high equity. Email avi@kled.ai

Job postings go here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44757794

Wait a minute, if users upload their camera rolls, doesn't that mean that in most cases these also contain footage of __other__ people?

Sorry, but wtf?!?

Correct but the person who took the pic/vid owns the rights for it legally speaking. This content is already being trained off of, scraped off YouTube, Instagram etc. All Kled does is put the money back into the pockets of the people.

Do they? That’s not an assumption you can make. I’ve likely got plenty of things in my phone I’m not allowed to have just by accident

Yeah, this sounds like just another sleazy way of a tech company to shove the liability to the user.

This will never fly in the EU.

working on it

> Correct but the person who took the pic/vid owns the rights for it legally speaking.

Not really, there are a lot of ways to take images/videos you aren't legally allowed to publish later. You can have them for yourself but you can't share them publically (or give to a company like yours).

I’m also curious about this. I’m not having a strong reaction yet because I’m just not quite sure what to make of it, though at first glance it certainly has me going “wait what?”

I hope it’s not just some boiler plate legalese about how you have to make sure you have the rights to everything you upload.

It’s not just boilerplate. We actively verify uploads using multiple signals: EXIF metadata, timestamps, device signatures, and visual similarity checks. If a file wasn't captured by the uploader’s device or shows signs of being scraped/copied, it gets flagged or rejected.

In short, if it's not your original content, it won’t pass. And we’re constantly tightening this loop as we scale.

I think I’m less worried about whether or not it’s my original content and more about whether or not what I shot is ok to sell

That being said I did not consider that side of things, and I think it’s great you’re so proactive about it. Hopefully that does not come off as condescending/patronizing!

Wow, you’ve cracked the mystery of photography .. sometimes people take pictures of other people. What’s next, discovering that mirrors reflect more than just yourself and that’s a valid wtf moment in your world view too …

lol yea, not sure what that guy is on

Read the rest of the comments in this subthread, then maybe you will understand what this is about.

HN is the UFC of capitalism .. blood, code, sweat and capital. You showed up barefoot with a manifesto about non violence … Wrong arena champ.

Can't reply to ur other comment but yea, Latham and Watkins represents us. The best lawyers on the planet, so yea we've talked to lawyers about it lol.

That's great. Good thing its explicitly illegal to distribute sexual material of another individual without their consent. But it's completely legal for you to own that material with their consent.

Your blanket claim that you own the rights to commercially distribute all photos that you took is just not true.

The law has limits on what you can do with your camera and photos. Until now, most people were operating within these limits, so there was no problem. In the modern times of big tech, automation, AI, and large scale photo databases, you simply cannot scale up your simple user's rights without running into the law. And imho, rightly so.

No one cares about the aggregated sum you spent, and something tells me that instead of directly saying how much the average user was paid, the PR team chose to divulge the total amount because it sounds better (someone must have pat themselves on the back when they phrased it as "we paid users $300K").

the money came directly from AI Labs paying for it. not venture or anything else.

That isn’t the issue. If you paid $300,000 to 300,000 users, each user made a dollar.

We paid $300,000 to 500 users, there's over 10,000 on the waitlist still. Each of them have uploaded over 200GB of data. Some at the 1TB limit.

That’s a better ratio than I would have expected, but I would have led with that. The title as it is written reads as a bait and switch. I initially read it as: “We paid a plurality of users $300,000 each for all of their data.”

It’s probably obvious to most readers that this isn’t what happened ($300,000 would be an absurd price for someone’s camera roll), but it feels misleading. People respond to that kind of thing really negatively here, which is probably why your post got flagged.

Why did you omit that it's a cryptocurrency? https://x.com/useKled/status/1932778949051838827

Oh man, sounded promising until discovering it was a rug pull.

I wonder if user data does have some value. I could see long haul dashcam footage possibility being worth something if you were training self driving cars...

It's a reasonable idea. Certainly it makes sense that AI companies need training data and people should have a way to sell that data to them. That said, given that the government seems to be moving in a "copyright does not apply to AI" direction, I would not want to putting my eggs in an "AI companies will pay for data" basket.

They are actively paying for it now, and regulation is moving in that direction as well. Regardless, someone's camera roll data, for example, isn't publicly available, meaning it can be sold, unlike someone's Instagram photos.

Private repositories of data will still be valuable due to AI content making public content not suitable for training purposes; but if copyright doesn’t apply the real issue is identifying the content, not paying for it; paying for it might be worse as you’re creating an incentive to upload junk data.

It's funny I had a similar idea but with dashcams, for the automotive industry. You could pay people to install additional cameras to there cars and pay them by the miles driven. I'm sure car manufacturers would love this training data.

we have around 4000 uber drives that are being onboarded now all uploading their dashcam footage. will see how valubale that data is soon.

>Backed by Leaders: Built with insights from top minds across AI, mobility, and consumer tech. NASA, Pika, Google, Meta, Tesla, character.ai.

Backed how? Are these companies endorsing your product? Are they customers? Do you have employees who worked for them?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com