Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the Beijing Film Academy in China, this paper examines how platforms and AI reshape ideas of “good work” before labour enters the market, showing how algorithms mediate creative labour and reconfigure productivity, fairness, responsibility, and value.

Paper long abstract

As platforms, AI, and data-driven systems increasingly organise labour, the meaning of “good work” is being rewritten. Digital anthropology has often centred on platform employment, the gig economy, or data labour, paying less attention to how algorithms shape workers’ values and ethics before labour enters the market. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Beijing Film Academy (BFA), this paper examines how platformisation and algorithmic systems rework standards of “good work” in the pre-industrial formation of creative labour.

Focusing on collaborative projects between internet video companies and BFA under the state’s “Internet+” policy, the paper traces AI-based film script evaluation systems as remote, non-face-to-face mechanisms of judgment that intervene in creative training, project selection, and access to resources. Treating algorithms as mediating infrastructures embedded in institutional settings, it shows how different actors attach moral meanings to them: platform management frame AI as a route to objectivity and efficiency in response to concerns about corruption and risk control; film producers use it to distribute accountability and manage investment uncertainty; BFA students adjust their creative strategies and career imaginaries in relation to platform preferences and algorithmic feedback.

In this highly digitalised environment, “good work” becomes less about expressive achievement alone than about creativity that is assessable, governable, and low-risk. The paper argues that algorithms function as moral technologies that reorder ideas of competence, fairness, and deservingness in Chinese creative labour.