Tesla Autopilot employees allegedly ignored traffic rules while training the system to drive ‘more like a human’

According to a recent report by Business InsiderTesla employees working on the brand’s Autopilot system have alleged that they were often advised by superiors to ignore certain traffic rules to make the system “run less robotically.”

Tesla’s Autopilot (and by extension, Fully self-driving software), like many other driver-assistance systems, relies on a small team of data annotators tasked with reviewing thousands of hours of footage sourced from participating car owners as well as the company’s internal test drivers.

These annotations help teach the system’s artificial intelligence (AI) to recognize road markings, signs, or objects. In doing so, the system learns how to react to different situations, such as knowing when to start braking depending on current weather conditions. Business Insider The annotators said they would review one 30-second clip at a time and be paid $20 an hour.

This publication spoke with 17 current and former employees on Tesla’s data annotation team, which is divided into three different facilities in the United States, including Buffalo, New York, Palo Alto, California, and Draper, Utah.

Depending on the project, it can take teams anywhere from a few days to a few months to complete their workflow, which requires workers to label short clips to track still images or overlay satellite data. “It can get monotonous at times,” said one former employee. “You can spend eight hours a day for months just labeling road markings and curbs on thousands of videos.”

The video clips are taken from cameras both outside and inside the car, and owners must agree to share their data with Tesla. “There’s something very strange about having this very private look into someone’s life. It’s weird to see someone’s daily driving journey, but it’s also a big part of fixing and refining the program,” said one current employee.

With Tesla cars sold in so many markets, workers could be dealing with data from any number of countries in a single workflow. This requires them to know the local road rules for each region, but it seems the company sometimes takes a more relaxed stance when it comes to the rules.

For example, some workers were told to ignore “No Turns on Red” or “No U-Turns” signs, meaning they wouldn’t train the system to obey them. “It’s a driver-first mentality. I think the idea is we want to train it to drive like a human, not like a robot that just follows the rules,” said one former worker.

The report also revealed that workers sometimes shared videos of accidents and near-accidents, a practice that has raised privacy concerns, prompting Tesla to restrict access to clips outside of workers’ assigned projects and add watermarks so they can more easily find the people sharing them. The issue was brought up by a Tesla employee who wrote about it in an essay published by Business Insider.

Latest report from Business Insider come a few months later previously in Julywhere four Tesla employees reportedly said they were asked to prioritize fixing the Autopilot software for company CEO Elon Musk and other social media celebrities with large followings.

“It seems pretty clear that Elon’s experience is going to be better than anyone else’s. He’s seen the software at its best. It seems like we’re intentionally making his car better to make Autopilot look different than it actually is. That seems disingenuous,” one worker said at the time.

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system is currently not available in Malaysia although you can buy it for RM32,000 with a Model 3 or Model X before that as the software is working in right-hand drive market.

Looking to sell your car? Sell it with Car.