“We abolished 16 undergraduate majors, including translation and photography, at once last year,” said Liao Xiangjung, a party secretary at Chanmei University, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Chanmei University is a media-related educational institution directly under the Education Ministry.
“The future is an era in which humans and robots are divided, and educational transformation is on the horizon,” he said. “The school class should be thoroughly reorganized.” In response, the university is said to have opened new majors such as “digital media art” and “AI audiovisual creation” in line with the development of AI. “These changes are the tip of the iceberg,” Shin Kyung-bo said. “The Ministry of Education and other related ministries are focusing on eliminating majors that do not fit the new technology and management methods.”
In 2023, the Chinese Ministry of Education demanded that about 20% of the department’s majors be optimized and adjusted by 2025. Accordingly, according to the changes in undergraduate majors at universities across China as of 2024, 1428 cases were abolished, 2220 cases were suspended from recruitment, and 1,839 new increases were found. Many of these abolished majors are said to be fields that can be easily replaced by AI.
“As of last year, there is an indicator that the accuracy of AI translation is 98.3%,” Shin Kyung-bo said. “The value of independent existence of general translation majors is disappearing as the result of translating contracts and manuals into AI does not need to be touched separately.” “In the field of video media, AI is already replacing jobs in basic filming, editing, subtitles, and dubbing,” he said. “If universities stick to their existing methods, students can become unemployed as soon as they graduate.” In fact, the release of China’s ByteDance’s new video-generating AI model “Sages” last month shocked the film and video industries such as Hollywood. As high-quality videos were made with only one photo and two or three lines of command, controversy over copyright and the replacement of manpower for related workers were publicized.
At the time, the American Film Association (MPA) asked ByteDance to immediately stop copyright infringement, saying it had used American works without permission on a large scale. Disney also sent a request to stop using the work, and Paramount is taking legal action, citing cases in which its characters were similarly created.
JENNIFER KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
