Chinese Tech Workers Ordered to Train AI Doubles — 'Colleague Skill' Tool Automates Self-Replacement, Sparks Pushback

MIT Technology Review·high signal

MIT Technology Review and Rest of World report that Chinese tech companies are instructing employees to train AI agents to replicate their own workflows. A GitHub project called 'Colleague Skill' from Shanghai AI Lab imports chat history and files from Lark/DingTalk, then generates reusable manuals describing a coworker's duties for an AI agent to replicate. Workers describe the process as reductive — 'as if their work had been flattened into modules.' Companies haven't yet successfully replaced workers because agents remain unreliable and require constant supervision. This is the most concrete evidence yet of systematic AI labor displacement attempts — and the friction that follows.