A new set of rules proposed by China’s ruling communist party seek to censor the country’s fast-emerging ChatGPT-like chatbots and ensure that the artificial intelligence technology reflects “socialist core values”.
The AI chatbot ChatGPT developed by American company OpenAI took the world by storm soon after it was launched in November last year.
Experts praising the tool’s ability to respond to user queries with human-like output even as concerns have emerged over the controversial uses of the technology.
Soon after ChatGPT grew in prominence, several countries across the world, including China, saw a frezy in investment on similar AI systems.
Such generative AI systems are trained to produce unique human-like content such as images and texts by analysing large quantities of data.
ChatGPT, for instance, has shown it can summarise complex racademic research studies in plain language, answer logical questions posed by users and also crack business school and medical exams.
Chinese tech giants including Alibaba and Baidu also announced their plans to roll out their own version of ChatGPT.
Alibaba revealed its AI chatbot Tongyi Qianwen earlier this month, which it plans to integrate across its services.
Following these announcements, regulators in China also followed soon with new draft rules to manage how companies develop such tools.
Some of the draft rules seek to ensure data used by Chinese companies to train their AI models do not discriminate against people on the basis of race, gender and ethnicity.
Regulators also seek to ensure companies are responsible for the legitimacy of the data used to train the algorithm, including that the chatbots do not generate false information.
A new report by The New York Times has revealed that China also seeks to ensure that the content of such AI systems reflect “socialist core values” and avoid information that undermines “state power” or national unity.
These rules, while not final, also suggest that regulators want AI chatbots to abide by the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship policy that already bans criticism of China’s leaders or discussion of the country’s forbidden history, according to NYT.
While Chinese tech giants like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Bytedance have already shown the technical prowess to build such chatbots, the proposed restictions might slow them down to incorporate changes and make it difficult for them to compete with their US rivals like Microsoft, Google and OpenAI.
