AI's rise sparks new professions, reshapes employment landscape(3)

Collaborative employment

Ye Cong, head of NetEase YooNexus Platform, has a more positive outlook on AI job creation.

"The digitalization of various industries will create continuous demand to train AI in different scenarios, offering more human-AI collaborative employment opportunities. The future relationship between humans and AI is one of collaboration, not replacement," Ye said.

NetEase's new platform accepts data tasks from businesses and breaks them down into multiple minor projects. Users can earn points by completing the projects, which can be exchanged for wages.

In less than three years since its foundation, the platform has garnered over 1 million registered users, mainly from western and northeastern regions of China, with an even gender split, mostly aged 25 to 35 years. Monthly active users exceeded 15,000.

The platform has expanded data annotation from traditional scenarios such as AI customer service, chatbots and image generators to physical projects in the engineering machinery industry, helping robots model tasks and providing more training scenarios and data for machine intelligence.

"We focus on excavators and loaders, helping them achieve precise smart operations in mines and ports," Ye said.

"We're now promoting collaboration with main engine manufacturers. The 'AI-ization' of physical industries ensures 24-hour excavator operation, greatly improving efficiency and addressing safety challenges in scenarios like underground mines," he said.

In these projects, manual "annotation-based" guidance for machines to learn tasks places greater demands on data annotators. "Most of them need to have industry experience and many are certified excavator operators," Ye said.

Beyond data annotators, new digital professions like face designers, motion capture artists, and virtual architects are also emerging. Instead of working at a company or platform, an increasing number of people are choosing to be self-employed.

College student Zhou Run is embarking on such a journey. He accepts orders on lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu to create virtual avatars that closely resemble real-life images.

For a fee of 50 yuan, clients can commission his work. However, to buy the rights to their avatar or obtain the numerical data of their avatar's features, they need to pay around 600 yuan.

"Today more gamers prefer the ability to freely change their appearance and customize their characters to achieve a more realistic experience in the virtual world. The pre-designed faces in games no longer satisfy players' needs for personalization, leading to the emergence of the 'face sculptor' profession, which is what I'm doing."

Zhou has been in the business for just under six months and has already amassed several hundred followers on his Xiaohongshu account. During peak periods, he can earn 4,000 to 5,000 yuan a month.

As his order volume increases, he has transitioned from traditional modeling tools and face sculpting software to AI tools that allow for mass production.