AI a smart career for migrant workers

HANGZHOU-Gong Fei used to work at a construction site in Shandong province, but he has recently found a new job as an artificial intelligence trainer.

Gong, 26, works as an AI trainer for a company in his home city of Tongren, Guizhou province.

AI trainers help computers and machines "understand" the human world by categorizing and labeling text, pictures and videos, which are then analyzed by the devices.

Every day, Gong arranges hundreds of pictures on a computer screen into two categories. For images of a soccer match, he needs to annotate them with "score" and "non-score".

"I need to teach the computer how to recognize the pictures according to the annotations," he said. "These days, more people have higher demands. They want to see more of their favorite stars or some particular scenes, and this is what I do; I make the systems smarter in regard to catering to people's needs."

Gong said the job is not easy and requires extreme patience.

"Sometimes a picture needs to have up to 100 annotations, and it can take six or seven hours just to do one picture," he said.

"But I am glad they offered me this job during this difficult time."

Gong said he can work from home and reduce his costs, which are much lower than the expenses he incurred while working outside his home province.

During the coronavirus outbreak, many migrant workers who usually leave the countryside for better-paying jobs in big cities have found new professions.

A total of 250,000 programs were added on Alipay, the mobile payment app of e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba, during the epidemic. These programs offered 750,000 jobs. In provinces with large numbers of migrant workers, such as Shaanxi and Guizhou, thousands of workers have chosen to stay in their hometowns to become AI trainers.

The jobs are permanent and pay well. Alibaba said it had turned out 100,000 AI trainers, with their average payment expected to rise by at least 50 percent.

"I heard that my job has been officially recognized as a new profession by the government," Gong said.

Early last month, the government listed 16 jobs as new professions, including AI trainers.

Yang Weiguo, a professor of labor and human resources at Renmin University, said stabilizing and increasing employment is important. "The digital era has created new professions," he said.

Lyu Peng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said: "The internet has truly played an important part during the epidemic. It digitalized China's service industry and became a new engine to power employment."