China’s lawyers, architects and engineers are becoming gig workers training AI

This piece captures the AI labour transition unusually well. Rest of World found underemployed Chinese professionals doing evening annotation work that requires genuine domain expertise. One Shenzhen architect whose income had halved teaches models how to produce building proposals and profitability analyses. Lawyers generate and grade legal reasoning; experienced software engineers design agentic coding tasks.

The jobs can pay only hundreds of yuan for several hours, and rejected work may earn nothing. Yet China actively wants this: its National Data Administration is encouraging “high-quality datasets” with higher “knowledge density.” ByteDance’s Xpert says it has recruited more than 50,000 experts. China’s training-data market is forecast at 7.8bn yuan this year, up 25%.

The paradox is almost perfect: deteriorating white-collar employment makes expert knowledge cheaper precisely when AI companies need that knowledge to automate more white-collar work.

The scarce input for the next model generation may increasingly be tacit professional judgment rather than another trillion tokens of internet text.