According to a recent report by Business Insider, Tesla employees who worked on the brand’s Autopilot system have alleged that they were often advised by their superiors to ignore certain road rules to make the system “drive less like a robot.”
Tesla’s Autopilot (and by extension, the Full Self-Driving software), like many other driver assistance systems, relies on a small army of data annotators tasked with reviewing thousands of hours of footage sourced from vehicle owners that opt in as well as the company’s in-house test drivers.
These annotators serve to teach the system’s artificial intelligence (AI) to recognise road markings, signage or objects. In doing so, the system learns how to react to different situations, such as knowing when to begin braking depending on the current weather condition. Business Insider claimed annotators reviewed one 30-second clip at a time and are paid USD20 an hour.
The publication spoke with 17 current and former employees on Tesla’s data annotation team, which is split across three different facilities in the United States, including Buffalo, New York, Palo Alto, California and Draper, Utah.
Depending on the project, teams can take anywhere from days to months to complete their workflows, which require staff to label short clips to trace still images or overlay satellite data. One former worker said, “sometimes it can get monotonous. You could spend eight hours a day for months on end just labeling lane lines and curbs across thousands of videos.”
The video clips are taken from the vehicle’s exterior and interior cameras, and owners must consent to sharing their data to Tesla. “There is something very strange about having this very intimate view into someone’s life. It feels odd to see someone’s daily drive, but it’s also an important part of correcting and refining the programme,” said a current employee.
With Tesla vehicles being sold in so many markets, workers can be faced with data from any number of countries in a single workflow. This requires them to be aware of the local road rules for each region, but it would appear the company sometimes takes a more relaxed stance when it comes to rules.
For example, some workers were told to ignore ‘No Turn on Red’ or ‘No U-Turn’ signs, meaning they would not train the system to adhere to those signs. “It’s a driver-first mentality. I think the idea is we want to train it to drive like a human would, not a robot that’s just following the rules,” one former worker said.
The report also revealed workers sometimes exchanged videos involving accidents and near-misses, a practice that is ladened with potential privacy issues that resulted in Tesla restricting access to clips outside of workers’ designated projects and adding watermarks so they could easily find those sharing. This issue was mentioned by a Tesla employee who wrote about it in an essay published by Business Insider.
The latest report from Business Insider comes a few months after an earlier one in July, where four Tesla employees allegedly said they were told to prioritise fixing the Autopilot software for company CEO Elon Musk and other social media personalities with large audiences.
“It seems pretty clear that Elon’s experience would be better than anyone else’s. He was seeing the software at its best. It seemed like we were purposefully making his car better to make Autopilot look different than it was. It felt dishonest,” a worker said at the time.
Tesla’s Full-Self Driving (FSD) isn’t currently available in Malaysia although you can buy it for RM32,000 with the Model 3 or Model X ahead of it the software being active in right-hand drive markets.
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