Work and AI: the Baidu engineer who designed the bot that will replace him
From one of China’s leading artificial intelligence companies comes a story that echoes the challenges to the dignity of work raised by Leo XIV in *Magnifica Humanitas*. In this case, the ‘handover’ was voluntary, but there is a growing trend towards zhengliu, the digital ‘distillation’ of employees’ skills. And there are young workers in the tech sector who are trying to protect themselves with tools that ‘hide’ parts of their work.
Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – In the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV pays particular attention to the impact of artificial intelligence on the world of work. The fourth chapter of the document highlights the ethical challenge of safeguarding the dignity of human activity in the “new ways of working” that the digital transformation is introducing.
Within this context, an interesting story was recently published on SixthTone, a Chinese social commentary website that closely follows developments, both in major cities and in the outskirts of this vast country – perhaps today more than any other at the forefront of artificial intelligence applications, including in the management of production systems.
The inspiration for this reflection is the story of Wei Ying (a pseudonym for privacy reasons), one of the leading engineers in algorithm design at Baidu, one of the giants of the Chinese IT industry. Having decided to change jobs, SixthTone reports, Wei spent his final week at the company devoting himself to a new kind of handover: the creation of an AI version of himself.
His colleagues fed the internal AI system with code, documents, research and chat histories, training it to mimic the way Wei solved problems and responded to colleagues. Within a week, according to Wei, the system was able to take over 90% of his work.
And even after he left the company, colleagues continued to message the digital ‘Wei’ with technical queries, assign tasks, send voice notes or upload images. The bot, named after his core expertise, was also given an avatar that could handle the work by replicating aspects of his programming and collaboration style. “The only thing you can’t do is make a video call,” said Wei.
This is not an isolated case: with the growing adoption of artificial intelligence tools in Chinese companies, workers are increasingly being asked to transform their knowledge and workflows into reusable systems, designed to outlive their time at the company. Chinese social media users have begun calling this phenomenon zhengliu, meaning “distillation”, reusing a technical AI term that refers to the compression of knowledge from a large model into a smaller, more efficient one. In this case, the aim is to artificially replicate a person’s skills,
This trend also has some surreal aspects: when the video game giant Tencent announced that its open AI platform SkillHub had surpassed 13,000 “skills” between official profiles and those created by users, an engineer at the Shanghai AI Laboratory, Zhou Tianyi, came up with the idea of creating a parody project called “colleague.skill”. In just ten days, the project achieved unexpected success, garnering over 10,000 ‘stars’ on GitHub. Spin-offs then emerged: ‘skills’ for ex-partners, investors and even celebrities, designed to ‘distil’ people into reusable AI identities.
On Chinese social media, many have compared the phenomenon to “soul refining”, a common theme in Chinese fantasy fiction, where spirits are extracted and absorbed. Although Zhou has reiterated that he created his project for fun, without expecting it to go viral.
Many young tech workers, however, are far less enthusiastic about these trends.
Fearing they might be helping to build their own replacements, some have started hiding parts of their work, whilst others are experimenting with “anti-distillation” tools to prevent AI from analysing their methods.
For his part, Wei accepted the creation of his avatar calmly, as his departure from the company was voluntary. “ ‘It’s like leaving a headstone,’ he said. ‘You want it to look good for those who come after.’ And it is a task made easier by the fact that within Baidu, the use of artificial intelligence is monitored in great detail, with internal dashboards that rank employees based on their activity. Wei explains that his department had begun encouraging the weekly presentation of AI-related results. “It’s not mandatory, but it affects promotions,” he explained.
However, SixthTone also gathered the opinion of a professor at Qingdao Huanghai University, Sun Zaifu, who emphasises that current laws in China are by no means adequate for managing systems trained on employee behaviour. In the event of errors or violations, he argues, responsibility risks becoming “everyone’s and no one’s”.
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13/09/2018 17:20
10/05/2025 11:18
