A staffing manager walks into a café in downtown San Francisco and hands out small packages. Inside each one is an elastic headband with a phone mount. The instructions are simple: strap it to your forehead, go home, and film yourself doing the dishes. Roughly two hours of usable footage pays about $80. One longtime gig worker, who has delivered food and hung Christmas lights for a living, summed up the appeal without much ceremony — he has to do the chores anyway, so he may as well be paid for them.

Two stories about compensating the people whose work underlies modern software and AI surfaced the same day, and they represent almost opposite mechanisms for solving the same problem. GitHub says individuals and organizations have invested more than $100 million in open source maintainers and projects through GitHub Sponsors since 2019, with $10 million of that total arriving in just the past five months. Separately, Sony Music has filed a second copyright suit against Udio, alleging the AI music company copied 30,117 recordings without permission to train its models.