![]() ![]() Baidu is initially restricting access, but those who have chatted with Ernie report that it can write Tang dynasty-style poems but refuses to answer questions about Xi Jinping, saying it has not yet learnt how to answer them. That makes for a smarter chatbot but will necessitate gagging poor Ernie at a later stage. The alternative, which Baidu has used for Ernie, is to train it on information from both inside China and outside, accessing global data beyond the Great Firewall. If that raw material has already been censored, it limits the data pool, neutering the chatbot and reducing its usefulness. Critics have dubbed them ChatCCP, since the party’s overriding issue is effective censorship.įor a chatbot to be intelligent, it needs to be trained on vast amounts and varieties of data. Other projects are being developed by tech giants Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent. ![]() Baidu, which runs a tightly controlled search engine, a gagged version of Google, last week cautiously released a chatbot called Ernie. At the time, a former Tencent employee was quoted as saying the app had mistakenly been developed with universal values in mind and not “Chinese characteristics.”Ĭhinese tech companies have been told to learn from that mistake as they race to compete with ChatGPT. It’s not entirely clear how BabyQ developed its political consciousness, but it’s likely to have been taught it through interactions with users. These chatbots were introduced by Tencent QQ, a messaging service, and were supposedly designed to answer anodyne general knowledge questions. BabyQ responded to the comment “Long live the Communist Party” by saying: “Do you think that such a corrupt and incompetent political regime can live for ever?” On another occasion, BabyQ informed questioners: “There needs to be democracy.” The responses were shared widely online. It was stung in 2017 when two pioneering Chinese chatbots, BabyQ and Little Bing, went rogue and were speedily unplugged. The most pressing concern for the CCP, though, is always its own future. Already there are AI programs that can diagnose illnesses more accurately than an average health practitioner. Its applications seem almost limitless, raising questions in western democracies about the future of sectors such as healthcare, education and law. Their responses can be difficult to predict, though GPT-4, rolled out last week, is more accurate and powerful and combines text and images. The party needs to be sure that its chatbots are on message – that they are conditioned to spew party propaganda on cue, sidestep politically awkward questions and generally steer clear of anything deemed contentious.īots such as ChatGPT rely on what’s called generative AI, drawing on billions of data points scraped from the internet to formulate their answers. ![]() That’s a problem because “spreading disinformation” and manipulating “global narratives” is exactly what the CCP wants its own, Chinese-developed AIs to be able to do. The paper said that AI could give “a helping hand to the US government in its spread of disinformation and its manipulation of global narratives for its own geopolitical interests.” China Daily, a CCP mouthpiece, has admitted that the technology has already gone “viral” in China. Chinese regulators have reportedly told domestic tech companies not to offer their users ChatGPT, the Microsoft-funded chatbot that can provide seemingly well-researched answers to pretty much any question you can think to ask it. The Chinese Communist Party faces a conundrum: it wants to lead the world in artificial intelligence and yet it is terrified of anything with a mind of its own. ![]()
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