Faces for kettles: data collection industry flourishes as China pursues AI ambitions

At the front of the line, a woman stands in front of a camera zip-tied to a tripod. She holds a photograph of her head with the eyes and the nose cut out in front of her face and slowly rotates side to side. Villagers waiting their turn take a numbered ticket. Some of them say it's the third or fourth time they've come to do this sort of work. The project, run out of a sleepy courtyard village house adorned with posters of former China leader Mao Zedong, is collecting material that could train artificial intelligence (AI) software to distinguish between real facial features and still images.