Text | Smart Relativism

Good news! The public institution you've been dreaming about has released the admission announcement!

Bad news! They didn't choose you; they chose a digital human.

Image source: Internet

With breakthroughs in digital human technology, more and more traditional businesses and institutions are adopting "digital employees."

Even the "iron rice bowl" that many Chinese people yearn for has been secured by these digital humans.

Digital Humans Secure the "Iron Rice Bowl"

A brief review of the "employment" situation in public institutions across the country reveals a rather optimistic outlook for digital humans' job prospects. Not long ago, under the recommendation of China Mobile Zhejiang, the digital human Xiao An successfully joined the live broadcast of Wenzhou People's Hospital, becoming a full-time anchor for the institution.

Image source: Internet

It is said that the employer is quite satisfied with the performance of digital human Xiao An. Since starting the live broadcasts, Xiao An has not only disseminated various health knowledge to the general public but also successfully attracted over 2,000 visits to Wenzhou People's Hospital, blazing a trail for the hospital's new media promotion efforts.

In Qingyuan City, at institutions such as the Yangshan County Procuratorate and the Lianshan Zhuang and Yao Autonomous County People's Procuratorate, a group of professional digital humans have also been successfully recruited as exclusive anchors for science popularization and policy promotion videos, thanks to the recommendation of China Unicom.

Image source: Internet

There are many similar cases. Initially, digital employees were only seen in banks and financial institutions, but now various municipal and township institutions are also competing to hire digital humans as staff.

Of course, the reason why the "iron rice bowl" is considered secure is that once you get it, you're set for life. Looking at the past employment history of digital humans, their jobs tend to be relatively stable.

Digital human "Tongtong," who was hired as a full-time employee by China Unicom in 2022, is still working for the company and regularly attends various important events organized or attended by China Unicom.

Image source: Internet

As an employee, Tongtong enjoys quite favorable treatment. Not only has she secured the "iron rice bowl," but she has also received extensive training from China Unicom, including various customized outfits and the use of deep learning technology to mimic human voices, expressions, and movements, enhancing her professional abilities and work performance.

This is no easy feat, and it shows that China Unicom is truly invested in Tongtong's development. Currently, natural language understanding and generation pose a significant challenge for the maturity of digital human applications. For instance, how can digital humans comprehend users' colloquial expressions and accurately interpret their intentions even when faced with non-standard language forms?

In short, enabling digital humans to communicate as naturally as humans do is crucial and challenging. This ability will be essential for digital humans to successfully fill various job roles in the future.

At present, the employment rate of digital humans is quite promising. Huawei alone has 8,000 digital employees within the company. In Ping An Bank's innovative applications, a considerable number of housing provident fund centers also employ digital staff. Especially with the efforts of China Mobile and China Unicom, not only are provincial-level telecom operators actively introducing their own digital employees to compete, but they are also driving regional public institutions and industry organizations to hire digital staff.

Image source: Internet

There's no such thing as an "iron rice bowl"; it's all about digital humans' determination.

Of course, calling it an "iron rice bowl" might not be entirely accurate. After all, with the in-depth development of the market economy, government agencies and public institutions are also embarking on reform measures such as downsizing staff and improving efficiency. The so-called "iron rice bowl" jobs are not as stable as one might think.

However, once digital humans step into their roles, they demonstrate remarkable determination, turning ordinary jobs into secure positions.

Xiao An, the digital customer service representative at the Market Supervision and Administration Bureau of Tong'an District, has been serving the public around the clock since starting her job, with no rest in sight. She is truly dedicated to her work.

Image source: Internet

This is not an isolated case but rather a collective advantage of digital humans competing for jobs. The AI virtual person created by Gu Jia, an analyst at China Merchants Securities, leverages large-model multi-modal interaction and generation capabilities. It can comprehend multiple dialects and foreign languages, providing round-the-clock customer support while continuously learning and growing to update its knowledge base.

Talk about intense competition! It's no wonder these digital human-occupied positions are considered "iron rice bowls." No one else can fill those shoes, unless it's an even stronger and more competitive digital human.

As more and more digital humans enter the workforce, expectations for them are rising. On one hand, there are demands for realism, naturalness, and professionalism. On the other hand, there are technological requirements, necessitating robust computational power, intelligence, operational capabilities, rendering, latency, and other core functions.

Image source: Internet

Moreover, before meeting these conditions, the digital human talent market must address the issue of sufficient talent availability to ensure adequate staffing and job performance.

In this regard, China Unicom's digital human mini-program allows users to upload or record a 2-3 minute video of themselves, capturing their speaking movements and skin condition. The backend then generates a customized digital avatar that accurately reflects their appearance.

Of course, this is a relatively straightforward application demonstration. The underlying technical solution involves capturing videos and voice recordings of individuals. China Unicom leverages its neural network-based text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system to convert Mel-spectrograms into time-domain waveform samples, achieving voice replication.

Further, using generative adversarial networks (GANs) and advanced optical flow estimation methods, the captured images are trained to enhance facial details, synchronize voice with lip movements, and achieve image replication.

Finally, the Visual Token extractor and multimodal action representation are used to extract data from text, images, and videos, which are then synthesized into videos through a multimodal interaction model, presenting the digital human's realistic state.

As one of the earliest operators to promote digital humans and the metaverse, China Unicom leverages its powerful 5G network and AI capabilities to offer digital human solutions that have received favorable reviews from customers.

If you can't replace digital humans, become their headhunter

Currently, the digital human talent market is booming. Increasingly, people who can't compete with digital humans for "iron rice bowl" jobs are turning to a new strategy: becoming headhunters for digital humans, supplying the market with new digital employees.

According to Tianyancha data, there were over 993,000 enterprises related to "digital humans" and "virtual humans" in 2023, with over 400,000 new additions, representing a year-on-year increase of 42.3%.

Driven by such human efforts, digital employees have become market darlings.

According to JD.com data, during this year's 618 shopping festival, the company's cloud-based digital human Yunyanxi worked in over 5,000 brand live streams, accumulating over 400,000 hours of broadcast time and attracting over 100 million viewers with 5 million interactions.

Image source: Internet

"Horses and oxen thought they could replace each other, but then the terrifying digital counterparts arrived. Karma is a bitch."

According to iiMedia Research, China's digital human industry drove a market size of 333.47 billion yuan and a core market size of 20.52 billion yuan in 2023, projected to reach 640.27 billion yuan and 48.06 billion yuan, respectively, by 2025.

Today, the market value of digital humans continues to soar.

Since digital humans secured the "iron rice bowl," the talent landscape in society may be subtly shifting. In the coming years, more digital humans will take center stage in the workplace.

"It may not be your competitors who defeat you, but your digital colleagues."

Image source: @ Mordor rice dumpling Mom

Of course, if you're clever enough, you won't just have digital colleagues; you might even have digital subordinates. That's some managerial clout right there.

Image source: @ Silicon based nine tailed fox Ai Big player

Work should be more interesting from now on. Before that, human employees will likely need to learn to coexist peacefully with their digital counterparts. Perhaps they'll have to learn to tolerate some of their "quirky" behaviors.

From a technical perspective, digital humans require high-quality datasets for growth. Currently, obtaining such datasets poses a challenge for many digital human vendors.

Inevitably, they need to deploy a select group of outstanding digital humans into work settings first, gradually collecting data through their work to refine and enhance subsequent digital employee capabilities.

For human employees, this might be an interesting experience – working alongside, competing with, and growing together with digital colleagues, ultimately achieving mutual success.

*All images in this article are sourced from the internet