Colleague Skill: AI job fears in China set off viral spread of supposed ability harvester

An open-source artificial intelligence project aimed at harvesting human capabilities into reusable AI “skills” has gone viral in China, gaining traction as a meme among the country’s uneasy young workers as they face growing job insecurity amid rapid AI advances.

Supposedly, certain skills of luminaries such as Steve Jobs, spiritual figures like Gautama Buddha and ordinary office workers have been extracted into digital form and uploaded online, making these skills – such as Jobs’ product intuition – available for anyone to tap for free.

The project, called Colleague Skill, was a whim that was developed in under four hours, its developer Zhou Tianyi told the Paper, a local media outlet affiliated with state-backed Shangyhai United Media Group.

Zhou, a 24-year-old engineer from the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, said its initial aim was to turn work communications, documents and experience into reusable skills to save human workers from repetitive work.

The tool was meant for when “your colleague quit, leaving behind a mountain of unmaintained docs”, Zhou wrote in a description of the project on Microsoft-backed Github, the world’s largest source-code hosting site. In such cases, the program would help “turn cold goodbyes into warm skills … and cyber-immortality”, he said. The tool was available in multiple languages including Spanish, German, Japanese, Russian and Portuguese.

The concept of a portable “skill” came from US AI start-up Anthropic, which uses the term to define a set of reusable capabilities that enable its chatbot Claude to handle specific workflows in a more structured and repeatable way.

South China Morning Post