Tesla Inc. employees who review and label video clips to help train the company’s Autopilot software have been told to ignore signs prohibiting U-turns and right turns at red lights, according to a report from Business Insider.
The publication said it interviewed 17 current and former workers on the electric vehicle maker’s data annotation team, which is split between offices in New York, California and Utah. Workers spend their days watching 30-second recordings captured by cameras on the outside and inside of Tesla vehicles.
While workers are required to know the traffic rules of whatever part of the world the videos they watch originate from, some said they were instructed not to teach Autopilot to follow certain road signs.
“It’s a driver-first mentality,” a former employee told Business Insider. “I think the idea is that we want to train it to drive like a human would, not a robot that’s just following the rules.”
Tesla closely monitors data annotation workers with surveillance cameras as well as software that tracks their speed and keystrokes, the report said. Some workers told the publication they were required to spend five to seven and a half hours annotating videos each shift, depending on their role, and could be fired if they fell five minutes short of that minimum three times in six months.
“It can get monotonous at times,” said one former employee. “You can spend eight hours a day for months on end just labeling lanes and curbs on thousands of videos.”
Some workers told Business Insider in a July report that they were told to prioritize fixing self-driving software glitches that Tesla CEO Elon Musk and customers who post videos of their vehicles on YouTube have faced.