FAR-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which the international team of NPR Snapshots of moments from their lives shares and work all over the world.
You may not realize it, but everything from AI chatbots and autonomous rice systems literally require trillion data points for training. My colleague Emily Feng and I were curious about the people behind the scenes – those who work in rooms like these, who collect and sort all that data for AI applications.
I took this photo earlier this month in a “Data Processing Center” in the North Chinese city of Shenyang. Cities like these were once dependent on fading industries such as steel and coal. Now they try to reinvent themselves by attracting new technology, including AI data work.
The tasks here looked incredible 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 seing – or pole getween a pavence betwence betwence betwence betwence betwence betwence betwence betwence betwence betwence betwence betwence betwence beswence betwence betwence betwence betwence besween It reminded me of the TV program Dismissal – That is also quite popular in China!
Even the manager of the center admitted that the work is quite monotonous. But I suppose this is how innovation looks behind the curtain – young employees quietly sort enormous amounts of data to provide the AI tools with power.
See more photos from all over the world:
- Greetings from Palmyra, Syria, with his once hotel named after a warrior queen
- Greetings from Mexico City, where these dogs drive a bus from and from school
- Greetings from the Galápagos Islands, where the blue-footed booby shows its colors
- Greetings from Afrin, Syria, where Kurds dismissed their hearts to celebrate spring
- Greetings from Dharamshala, India, where these Tibetan children had the best time
- Far from the front line, Ukrainians wage a war to preserve their culture
- While Greenland is preparing for tourism, a moment of silence
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