Hello, Fortune senior writer David Meyer here in Berlin, filling in for Jeremy today.
The Chinese authorities are already cracking down on generative A.I. In a series of measures announced Tuesday, the country’s Cyberspace Administration said it wanted to “promote the healthy development and standardized application” of A.I.s that generate text, pictures, sounds, videos, code, and other content, and that means…well, pretty much the kind of rules you’d expect to come from Beijing.
Generative A.I. must emit content that reflects “the core values of socialism” and avoids anything that might subvert state power or “undermine national unity.” False and “extremist” information is out, as is “content that may disrupt economic and social order.” The wish list also includes a lot of things that governments around the world may soon be calling for, when they finally try to catch up with the astonishing pace of generative A.I.’s development—like non-discriminatory datasets and output, and respect for intellectual property rights.
And then there's this: Chinese companies that want to use generative A.I. to serve the public will first have to submit their tech for an official security assessment.
Cast your mind back a week or two, to when Elon Musk et al. called for a six-month pause in the development of next-generation generative A.I. systems, for safety’s sake. Remember all those people, like Eric Schmidt, who said such a pause would only benefit China? Well, here’s China implementing its own self-limitations.
One can certainly see why Beijing is moving so quickly to regulate generative A.I. tech. These are more or less the same rules the Communist Party applies to the Chinese internet, in keeping with the government's well-established track record of ensuring that new forms of information distribution comply with its censorship-friendly framework.
But it’s hard to see how the measures won’t seriously hold back big Chinese tech firms like Alibaba Group and SenseTime, which have in the last couple of days laid out major chatbot plans. On the one hand, we have Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang trilling that generative A.I. and cloud have brought us to a “technological watershed moment” as “businesses across all sectors have started to embrace intelligence transformation to stay ahead of the game.” On the other, there’s state-run media warning against “excessive hype” and calling for “an orderly market with standards for information disclosure, to support the long-term development of A.I.” It’s not hard to see why, despite their recent reveals, the likes of Baidu, Alibaba Group and SenseTime all saw their share prices drop today.
If there’s an inherent tension here between international competitiveness and control by the CCP, President Xi Jinping’s Party is likely to win. And that means additional challenges for Chinese companies already hamstrung by Western sanctions curbing access to the powerful hardware needed for A.I. innovation. So I’m not sure that the China threat is such a solid argument against the rest of the world taking a breather to figure out its own regulatory responses to generative A.I.
More A.I. news below.
David Meyer
Twitter: @superglaze
david.meyer@fortune.com
