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Artificial intelligence
TechTech Trends

Will ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools worsen China’s job crisis? Country’s employment landscape faces sweeping disruption

  • Generative AI technology is bringing sweeping disruptions to certain traditional occupations in China and the country’s broader job market
  • The stakes appear high in China, where low birth rates have combined with a rapidly ageing population to result in a widening demographic imbalance

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A recent study found that employment opportunities in China are quickly disappearing for positions that can be easily replaced by artificial intelligence, including those in sales, accounting, training, software development, office management and client services. Photo: Shutterstock
Coco Fengin Beijing
In the southwestern tech hub of Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, Matthew Chen co-founded a small video gaming studio and publisher that has recently embraced generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology to become more efficient, while vastly reducing its manpower requirements – an emerging trend in the world’s second-largest economy.
By adopting two foreign-developed tools – Stable Diffusion, a deep-learning system that generates detailed images based on text descriptions, and AI chatbot ChatGPT – which are both officially not available in China, Chen’s company has done away this year with an army of contractors who used to do translation work.

“ChatGPT translates much faster, and it costs only US$20 a month,” Chen said. By comparison, a third-party translation firm can charge as much as 100,000 yuan (US$14,000) for a year’s contract, he said.

Copywriters, foreign-language customer service employees and some illustrators can also be replaced by AI, according to Chen. He said his company is experimenting with Stable Diffusion, which turns text prompts into images, to make rough sketches into images. This system can be about 80 per cent as good as a human illustrator, he said.

The changes made at Chen’s video gaming studio represent a small fraction of the sweeping disruptions brought by generative AI technology to certain traditional occupations in China and the country’s broader job market.

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