Competition for jobs is currently fierce in China. After graduating from college earlier this year with a business major, David struggled to find work. There were too many applicants for every position and, he says, “even if you find a job, the pay isn’t as high as previous years and you have to work long hours.”
After David – who asked for anonymity to talk freely about his business – saw some videos on Weibo and WeChat about ChatGPT, the generative artificial intelligence chatbot released to much fanfare late last year by US technology company OpenAI, he got an idea . There is a thriving business in essay writing in China, with students asking teachers and experts to help them with their homework. Brokers operating on the e-commerce platform Taobao hire writers, whose services they sell to students. What if, David thought, he could use ChatGPT to write essays? He approached one of the sellers on Taobao. He soon got his first job, writing a paper for a student majoring in education. He didn’t tell anyone he was using a chatbot.
“You first ask ChatGPT to generate an overview with a few bullet points, and then you ask ChatGPT to come up with content for each bullet point,” says David. To avoid blatant plagiarism, he did not try to enter existing articles or papers, but asked the chatbot open-ended questions. He chose longer sentences and asked ChatGPT to elaborate and provide examples. Then he read through the piece and corrected any grammatical errors. The result wasn’t the smoothest, and there were a few logical gaps between paragraphs, but it was enough to complete the assignment. He submitted it and earned $10. His second job was writing an economics paper. He flipped through the requirements, picked up a few key terms, such as “dichotomy,” and asked ChatGPT to explain these terms in an easy-to-understand way and provide examples. He earned about $40.
ChatGPT is officially not accessible to Chinese users. Emails with Chinese domains, such as QQ or 163, cannot be used to sign up for the service. Nevertheless, there is enormous interest in the possibilities of the system. Youdao, a popular online education service operated by technology giant NetEase, recently released an online course, “ChatGPT, From Entry to Proficiency,” promising to “increase your work efficiency by 10 times using ChatGPT and Python.” On Zhihu, the Chinese quora, a forum website where questions are created and answered, users ask “how to make the first pot of gold with ChatGPT”; “how to earn RMB1,000 with ChatGPT”; “how ordinary people can make money with ChatGPT?” The answer – which ChatGPT told me itself when I asked it how to make $100 – is content. Lots of content.
Yin Yin, a young woman who has worked for a few social media influencers as a content creation assistant, came across ChatGPT after seeing a viral YouTube video. In April, she found a shop in Taobao that sold interior decor using traditional Yunnan tie-dye techniques. She approached the owner and offered to help him improve the layout and do some social media promotion. The store’s product descriptions were clear and lacking in detail, she says. She tracked down the most popular interior items on Taobao, extracted their product descriptions and passed them on to ChatGPT for reference. To make the content even more eye-catching, she asked ChatGPT to specifically highlight a few product features and add a few emojis to make it more appealing to the younger generation. She is now paid monthly by the owner of the Taobao store.
Others use AI for much more than just product descriptions. A user, Shirley, who also asked to be identified by only her first name because she writes under a pseudonym, Guyuetu, on the fashion and lifestyle sharing platform Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu), published an entire book written using AI. She concluded on the subject: the correlation between blood type and personality (a pseudoscientific belief relatively common in Japan and Korea). She asked ChatGPT to “create an outline for a book about Japanese people’s views on blood type and personality,” and then used it to create an outline for each chapter, then generate different sections for each chapter. “If you don’t like what’s written, you can always ask ChatGPT to rewrite it, such as rewriting a paragraph with a nicer, more light-hearted tone,” she says. Within two days, she completed the book “The Little Book of Blood Type Personality: The Japanese Way of Understanding People,” with a cover and illustrations created by Midjourney, a service that renders images of text prompts. She published the book on Kindle.
