The New York Times reports on the Chinese government's plan to impose strict rules on artificial intelligence. They are to meet the requirements of censorship and information control. However, is this plan compatible with the aim of being a strong competitor in the field of technology?
A complete ban on AI
The Chinese Communist Party is renowned for its strict censorship of the internet and other media, and is careful about what information about the country is released to the world. So as soon as artificial intelligence tools that can generate any kind of claims in an uncontrolled manner have emerged, the Chinese government has decided to ban them outright in case they provide information that is inconvenient to the regime there.
While most of the rest of the world is only talking about regulation for AI, China has already taken some radical steps in this regard. Neither ChatGPT nor Bard is available in the country, and any other domestic alternatives, such as ChatYuan, have failed to meet the demands of censorship. But can China afford to sacrifice a technology that has changed the world overnight?
Photo by Reuters
China will use AI in its own way
The Chinese government is probably aware of the huge potential of AI and cannot just ignore it. Firstly, it would be unable to compete with Western technology companies and secondly, it would lose a powerful tool for its political practices that we know from Orwellian utopias.
So the question still remains whether it is possible to train language models not to invent, or to generate only what China wants. The rules that the government will introduce are so far, according to experts, only suggestions and not only related to politics. They also address, for example, the problem associated with companies training AI on data that did not belong to them.
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