Greetings from Shenyang, China, where workers sort AI data in ‘Severance’-like ways
Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR’s international team shares snapshots of moments from their lives and work around the world.
You might not realize it, but everything from AI chatbots and autonomous driving systems requires literally trillions of data points to train. My colleague Emily Feng and I were curious about the people behind the scenes — those working in rooms like this one, who collect and sort all that data for AI applications.
I took this photo earlier this month at a “data processing center” in the northern Chinese city of Shenyang. Cities like this were once dependent on fading industries like steelmaking and coal. Now they’re trying to reinvent themselves by attracting new tech, including AI data work.
The tasks here looked incredibly abstract: workers spending hours drawing boxes around moving shapes and green dots on a screen, and checking them against camera images to help the AI understand what it’s seeing — like telling the difference between a person and a pole, or a parked car and one that’s moving. It reminded me of the TV show Severance — which is quite popular in China too!
Even the center’s manager admitted the work is pretty monotonous. But I suppose this is what innovation looks like behind the curtain — young workers quietly sorting through massive amounts of data to power the AI tools more and more of us use.
See more photos from around the world:
- Greetings from Palmyra, Syria, with its once-grand hotel named for a warrior queen
- Greetings from Mexico City, where these dogs ride a bus to and from school
- Greetings from the Galápagos Islands, where the blue-footed booby shows its colors
- Greetings from Afrin, Syria, where Kurds danced their hearts out to celebrate spring
- Greetings from Dharamshala, India, where these Tibetan kids were having the best time
- Far from the front lines, Ukrainians fight a war to preserve their culture
- As Greenland prepares for tourism increase, a moment of stillness
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