"China’s AI boom depends on an army of exploited student interns" 14 September 2023

...Data annotators label vast quantities of raw data — tagging images of cars, screening videos for violent content, and filtering audio for keywords — to train machine learning models. Their labor, often underpaid and overlooked, is crucial to the development of new AI applications — from intelligent chatbots to autonomous vehicles.

In recent years, China’s data labeling companies have partnered with vocational schools, recruiting student interns to do this tedious and labor-intensive work — often for sub-minimum wages and under poor conditions — in order to fulfill their graduation requirements, a Rest of World investigation has found...

...Many of China’s tech giants have partnered with vocational schools in these less-developed regions to create data annotation internships. Last March, search giant Baidu established an annotation center with a vocational school in Jiuquan, Gansu, one of China’s poorest provinces. The company received 30 million yuan ($4.1 million) from the local city government. According to a student intern’s post on the Jiuquan mayor’s online message board in 2022, the school forced more than 160 students to annotate data for Baidu, or they would not receive their degree.

In an email reply to Rest of World, Baidu said it was not aware of the situation. The company said it prioritized labor rights and “the dignity of employees,” and urged its service providers to do the same...

...The Guizhou-based data labeling firm Mengdong has worked with tech giants such as Baidu, Alibaba, and JD.com...Managers at data annotation firms in three different regions told Rest of World that companies use student interns because they can pay them less, and do not need to pay for their social security. Two of them said schools often took commissions...One data firm manager, who requested anonymity for fear of being identified by others in the industry, told Rest of World 60% of his company’s annotators were vocational school students. They worked eight hours a day, six days a week, for more than six months — and were paid 3000 to 4000 yuan ($409–$545) a month, of which the schools took a cut of 600 to 1000 yuan ($82–$136), he said...

...Data annotators who work in content moderation are also often exposed to traumatic content. According to Ryan, a former manager at a data labeling firm in Zhejiang, their team of annotators — mostly female vocational school students — reviewed data sets from April to June 2020 to train Chinese tech giant NetEase’s AI content moderation system. The work involved screening out violent and pornographic content, such as hate speech, bloody images and nude photos. “After a day of work, you just wanted to wash out your eyes,” said Ryan, requesting to use a pseudonym for fear of repercussions...

...Xu, a communications major from Hefei province, told Rest of World she applied for an internship at AI company iFlytek this summer. She had wanted to gain work experience and add a reputable company to her resume, but ended up annotating data to train learning devices. “My brain feels stiff and my eyes hurt from staring at the same stuff on a computer all day,” said Xu...

...NetEase, Alibaba, JD.com, Mengdong, and iFlytek did not respond to Rest of World’s request for comment...