Society
China's 'Human Distillation,' and a Same-Day Run of Fraud and Spying Cases
A term spreading through China's tech industry, 'human distillation,' describes harvesting employees' chat logs and work data to build an 'AI clone' that copies their thought process down to their writing habits—while 12.7 million university graduates are already struggling to find work. Japanese threads read it as a preview of their own near future, split between amazement at the dystopia and a colder line that the work was only ever the kind AI can reproduce. On the same day, reports of Chinese nationals detained in Thailand over fraudulent citizenship for more than 1,400 children and a Chinese-Canadian woman arrested for spying at NATO headquarters in Belgium merged the two subjects into a single argument.