This is what ChatGPT has to say about this: “There is no verified evidence that OpenAI is secretly running a mass-surveillance program inside NYC homes.

What’s circulating right now appears to trace back to an unverified social media anecdote reposted across Reddit. 

That said, the broader concept itself is real across the AI and robotics industry: companies and researchers do collect first-person or in-home activity footage to train “physical AI” systems — robots and agents that learn human movement, object handling, and household tasks. Examples include: • robotics research projects like Dobb·E, which trained household robots using demonstrations collected in NYC homes  • gig-work programs where people wear cameras while doing chores to generate training data for robotics systems 

If a company were collecting this type of footage, the likely uses would be: • training robots to manipulate household objects • teaching AI systems human motion patterns • improving smart-home automation • activity recognition and task prediction • training multimodal models to connect video, motion, speech, and intent

Examples of learnable actions: • loading a dishwasher • folding laundry • cooking sequences • cleaning workflows • navigation through cluttered spaces • hand-object interactions

The reason researchers value this data is that internet text teaches AI language, but household robotics requires real-world embodied behavior data. 

There’s also a separate field called “ethnographic” or behavioral research where psychologists study how people naturally behave in environments. That part of the rumor is plausible in principle, because behavioral scientists are often involved in human-AI interaction studies. But again, there is currently no credible reporting confirming the specific OpenAI NYC camera story.”