Chinese court awards compensation to sacked worker replaced by AI

A court in China has ruled in favour of a worker whose company replaced him with artificial intelligence (AI), awarding him more than £28,000 in compensation. The worker, whose surname is Zhou, joined a tech company in the eastern city of Hangzhou in 2022 to work as a quality assurance supervisor overseeing large language models used in AI products. The company, which has not been named publicly, later said AI could do his job and offered him a demotion and a 40% pay cut. When he refused, the company fired him. Zhou disputed his dismissal, and the Hangzhou intermediate people’s court ruled last month that the company had been wrong to fire him and ordered that he be paid 260,000 yuan in compensation. The case has attracted widespread attention as an example of how China can balance the country’s enthusiastic adoption of AI with job security, especially at a time of high youth unemployment. Chinese state media heralded the ruling as sending “a reassuring message to labour rights protection efforts in the age of automation”. People in China, encouraged by their government and by a generally optimistic attitude towards technology, tend to be more positive than their counterparts in the west about AI’s potential to improve their lives. A recent survey by the polling firm Ipsos found that more than 80% of people in China were excited about products that use AI, compared with fewer than 40% in the UK or the US. …