China's unemployed architects, lawyers, engineers take low-paid gig work training AI models on their own professions amid economic downturn; government pushes data annotation as flexible employment while tech giants like Alibaba, ByteDance recruit 50,000+ experts to compete with Silicon Valley.

Now it’s China’s experts who are gig workers training AI

As a Shenzhen-based architect in her 40s, Cuicui has vast experience designing public stadiums, schools, and hospitals at an architecture firm. But over the past five years, declining government infrastructure spending caused a sharp drop in business. Her income halved. To keep paying her mortgage and cover her child’s extracurricular fees, Cuicui became a specialized AI trainer. At the end of her regular workday, she would log on to a data annotation platform called TalentsAI, and give an AI mo...