Squeezed by a stagnant economy and state directives, China’s underemployed lawyers, architects, and engineers are taking cheap gig work to teach AI their trades — just to pay this month’s mortgage

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/59073944

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• Chinese tech giants are recruiting skilled professionals as specialized AI trainers to build high-quality data sets.
• Facing economic downturns and layoffs, professionals take these challenging annotation gigs as supplementary income.
• The efforts mirror U.S. platforms like Mercor and Handshake hiring domain experts to narrow the technological gap with Silicon Valley.

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In the U.S., data companies like Mercor, Surge AI, and Handshake have already recruited tens of thousands of Hollywood filmmakers, lawyers, and scientists to train AI models on various white-collar tasks. These jobs are now emerging in China, as the government pushes for AI adoption across the economy.

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Chinese workers say the work is precarious, demanding, and lower-paid than in America. But as they face a tough job market and disruption from AI, the Chinese professionals say they have taken the gigs to make money as well as to participate in what they believe to be an industry of the future.

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Similar to their Western counterparts, the [Chinese] freelance AI trainers said they are told to come up with realistic work tasks, upload documents from their actual jobs, and write down their own thought process so AI can learn from it. Trainers are not allowed to use AI themselves. It usually takes a few hours to complete a task, which earns them 100 to 500 yuan ($15 to $74), they say.

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Platforms including Xpert have stated in their user terms that trainers will not be paid if their submissions do not meet requirements or pass reviews. Siriser said trainers could make revisions or appeal if their submissions were rejected.

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