Competition for jobs is fierce in China right now. After graduating from college with a business degree earlier this year, David struggled to find work. There are too many applicants for every position, and he says, “even if you do find a job, the pay isn’t as high as it was years ago and you have to work long hours.”
After David – who requested anonymity to talk freely about his business – watched several videos on Weibo and WeChat about ChatGPT, the innovative artificial intelligence chatbot was developed by the US technology company. operated at the end of last year. openAI, he came up with an idea. There is a thriving essay writing business in China, with students asking tutors and experts to help them with their homework. Brokers operating on the Taobao e-commerce platform hire writers to sell their services to students. David thought, what if he could use ChatGPT to write an essay? He approached one of the sellers on Taobao. He quickly got his first job, writing a newspaper for a student majoring in education. He didn’t tell anyone he was using a chatbot.
“First, you ask ChatGPT to create an outline with a few bullet points, then you ask ChatGPT to come up with content for each bullet,” says David. To avoid obvious plagiarism, he tried not to provide existing articles or articles, but instead asked the chatbot open-ended questions. He chose longer sentences and asked ChatGPT to explain and give examples. Then he reads through the passage and corrects any grammatical errors. The results weren’t the smoothest and there were a few logical gaps between the paragraphs, but it was enough to complete the exercise. He sent it and made 10 dollars. His second job was to write an economic paper. He goes through the requirements, picks up some important terms like “division” and asks ChatGPT to explain these terms in a way that is easy to understand and gives examples. He earns about 40 dollars.
ChatGPT is not officially accessible to Chinese users. Emails with Chinese domains, like QQ or 163, cannot be used to register for the service. However, there is a great deal of interest in the potential of the system. Youdao, a popular online education service run by tech giant NetEase, recently released an online course: “ChatGPT, from start to finish”, which promises to “increase efficiency” 10x your work with the help of ChatGPT and Python”. On Zhihu, China’s Quora, a forum site where questions are created and answered, users ask “how to earn the first pot of gold with ChatGPT”; “how to earn 1,000 RMB with ChatGPT”; “how can ordinary people make money with ChatGPT?” The answer—which ChatGPT himself told me when I asked it how to make $100—is content. Lots of content.
Yin Yin, a young woman who used to work for several social media influencers as a content creator assistant, came to know ChatGPT after watching a viral video on YouTube. In April, she found a shop on Taobao that sold home decorations using the traditional Yunnan tie-dying technique. She approached the owner and offered to help him improve its layout and do some social media advertising. She said that the store’s product descriptions were simple and lacked detail. She tracked down the most popular home decor items on Taobao, extracted their product descriptions, and fed them to ChatGPT for reference. To make the content 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 currently paid a monthly salary by the owner of the Taobao shop.
Others are using AI for more than just product description. One user, Shirley, who also requested to be identified just by her name because she writes under the pseudonym Guuetu, on the fashion and lifestyle sharing platform Little Red Book (Little Rose), published an entire book written in AI. She decided on a topic: the correlation between blood type and personality (a pseudoscientific belief that is relatively common in Japan and Korea). She asked ChatGPT to “create an outline for a book about Japanese blood types and personalities,” then used it to create an outline for each chapter, and then create different sections for each chapter. “If you don’t like what has been written, you can always ask ChatGPT to rewrite it, such as rewriting a paragraph in a happier, more cheerful tone,” she says. Within two days, she completed the book “Blood Type Personality Brochure: A Japanese Way of Understanding People,” with cover and illustrations created by Midjourney, a word-for-word image creation service. text prompt. She has published the book on Kindle.
