As part of China’s digital underclass, vocational school students work as data annotators—for low pay and few future prospects.

By Viola Zhou and Caiwei Chen | Published by Rest of World on Sept. 14, 2024

Summary

China’s AI industry exploits vocational school students by making them perform tedious and labor-intensive data labeling tasks as part of their graduation requirements. These schools deploy student labor to annotate data for tech companies and carmakers, often taking a portion of the students’ earnings. While vocational schools promote these internships as opportunities to enhance career prospects, students describe the work as cheap, manual labour akin to assembly line jobs, with little protection against exploitation and abuse.

Excerpt:

Vocational school students in China, many of whom come from lower-class and rural backgrounds, are particularly vulnerable to labor abuse. Cases of such abuse and student suicides in vocational school internships have sparked public outrage in the country. Students have been forced to work grueling shifts, take on jobs unrelated to their studies, and share their wages with their schools. [One researcher] cited the case of a female student who lived in a dormitory for her data annotation internship and was banned from going home for six months.

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.

Read the full report at the publisher’s website here.