What next for the struggling rural mothers in China who helped to build AI?

Illustration: Brian Wang Before autonomous driving freed up the hands of Beijing’s middle class, thousands of workers some 1,500km (930 miles) away in China’s southwestern Guizhou province clicked away at computer screens to teach AI about navigating traffic.

In the mountainous city of Tongren, where incomes are less than half those in Beijing, the work of data labelling – marking residential buildings, pavements, roadways and traffic lights – shaped the artificial intelligence guiding those vehicles.

The job required little formal training and could be done almost anywhere, two factors that brought together the interests of tech companies seeking AI training data, the government aiming for job growth and workers needing jobs.

In China, AI-labelling workshops run by leading tech firms and supported by the state played a pivotal role in Beijing’s drive to alleviate absolute poverty in rural Guizhou, historically one of the country’s poorest provincial economies by GDP per capita.

One AI data-labelling poverty alleviation project created jobs for mothers with little education while enabling them to stay near home.

Success came early as the interests of three groups aligned.

However, years after Beijing declared an end to absolute poverty, both government subsidies and the AI strategies of Chinese tech giants have changed.

Once hailed as a solution in China’s poverty alleviation campaign, the workshops now face a painful reckoning.

As government subsidies dry up and rapid advancements in AI demand more sophisticated data than many rural workers can provide, a programme that used to promise a hi-tech lifeline for the poor is struggling with plummeting wages, stiff competition and a workforce increasingly mismatched with the industry’s needs.

The entrance to the AI data-labelling workshop in Tongren, Guizhou province, bears a slogan stating, “start a new life and realise a new dream”.

Photo: Alcott Wei Hu Yu was one of 50 mothers working at the Tongren workshop when it launched in 2019.

At the time, mothers were about half of the centre’s workforce but today they account for around 20 per cent. “If it weren’t for the need to take care of my kids closely, I wouldn’t want to keep doing this job,” Hu Yu, a mother employed at the workshop, said.

The scheme was part of President Xi Jinping’s poverty alleviation campaign that sought to eliminate absolute poverty, defined as an annual income of less than 4,000 yuan (US$580) when the nationwide campaign end

原文链接: 南华早报