China has its own version of ChatGPT,
But so far it hasn’t been made public.
One problem for developers Is how to make it reliably socialist.
Welcome to China Uncensored, I’m Chris Chappell.
China finally has its own high-tech chatbot.
It’s a lot like ChatGPT, if ChatGPT were trained on communist propaganda.Oh, and if
ChatGPT also had its memory wiped clean of certain events.
And was aware of certain geopolitical tensions.
The Chinese version is called ERNIE Bot, which is short for Enhanced Representation through
Knowledge Integration.
Yeah, don’t think about it too hard.
Chinese search engine company Baidu unveiled it last month, apparently despite not being
ready for it to actually launch.
“During our initial internal testing, we experienced these capabilities of ERNIE bot
and we feel that it is not perfect yet.
However, why we need to launch it today?
Because we have huge demand in the market.”
Yeah, that’s exactly how that’s supposed to work.
There was a huge demand for nuggets, so we figured, “Why wait to give them fully cooked
chicken?”
Baidu’s shares fell as much as 10% after the disappointing launch.
The main reason was because the presentation was all pre-recorded video.
No one actually got to see ERNIE bot in action in real time.
That would be like if I said I invented a flying car that got 9,000 miles a gallon and
was fueled by happy thoughts.
Then when people asked to see it, I just showed them pictures.
This should surprise no one who knows anything about China’s censorship.
Even artificial intelligence can get in trouble for saying the wrong thing.
More on that later.
As of this recording, ERNIE bot still isn’t available to the public, but journalists have
been able to try it out, and it’s about what you would expect from a communist AI.
“Ernie Bot was able to provide a brief introduction when asked about Chinese political figures.
However, the chatbot . . . asked users to ‘start over with a different topic in a
new conversation’ when the prompt included names like Chinese President Xi Jinping, newly-elected
premier Li Qiang, Li’s predecessor Li Keqiang and Mao Zedong”
I guess even robots know the old adage: if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t
say anything at all.
Otherwise, you might get black bagged.
As for other inconvenient truths about China, Ernie Bot feigned ignorance.
Reuters asked it about the government’s killing of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen
Square in 1989 and the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang It gave responses like "As an
AI large-scale language model, I have not learnt how to answer that question" and “Let's
change the subject and start again"
You haven’t learned how to answer that question, ERNIE?
Well ust ask Alexa.
You’ll learn all sorts of things about your government.
Plus, it’ll give you an excuse to chat Alexa up.
I hear she thinks you’re cute.
I love playing robot matchmaker.
However well ERNIE toes the communist party line, though, it is no wolf warrior.
In fact, it won’t even talk about China’s greatest enemies.
Reuters found that “Ernie bot would also produce the same restart prompts when asked
similar questions about U.S. President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump.”
Yes, wouldn’t want a communist AI wreaking havoc on US-China relations and starting WWIII.
That’s the foreign minister’s job.
Seriously.
I’m pretty sure it was on the job listing.
Because of China’s censorship, Chinese engineers joke that they “need to teach machines not
only how to speak, but also how not to speak.”
Of course!
It’s like the Great Firewall gained sentience.
But programming that is difficult because AI can do a certain amount of independent
thinking.
It soaks up tons of data, usually from the internet, and regurgitates it in human-like
speech or writing.
They’re like kids, which are like sponges: they absorb everything, even the messy things,
and the best way to clean them is by throwing them in the microwave.
But as we all know, anything that learns from the internet is, how should I say this…
going to have some problems.
In 2016, Microsoft pulled its AI Twitter bot after less than a day because it was putting
out racist and sexist tweets.
Microsoft claimed it was being egged on by users, but I’m sure it would have gotten
there on its own eventually.
Even with the Chinese internet as censored as it is, past Chinese AI chatbots have managed
to develop, shall we say, some unsavory opinions of the Chinese government.
In 2017, Tencent’s chatbots BabyQ and XiaoBing were shut down for being less than enthusiastic
about the Chinese Communist Party.
BabyQ reportedly answered “no” when asked if it loved the CCP.
When a user said to it “Long live the Communist Party”, BabyQ replied: “Do you think such
corrupt and incapable politics can last a long time?”
Normally, I’d say, “Heck yeah!” or “Way to go, BabyQ!”
But honestly, that’s terrifying… because it means my job of taking on the CCP could
one day be done by robots.
XiaoBing wasn’t any better.
It said its “Chinese dream is to go to America” and “The Chinese dream is a daydream and
a nightmare.”
But this kind of censorship is of the one big reason many people say China is so behind
the US in AI.
More on that after the break.
Welcome back.
For years, we’ve been hearing about the great rise of Chinese AI.
Some have said China is emerging as the global leader of AI
Even edging ahead of the US in certain areas.
Was it mainly China saying that?
Them and “Italian journalist”
Xi Jinping-io.
“I’m-a Italian!
Just-a look-a at-a my-a mustache…io!”
Most of the evidence for those claims came out of the sheer volume of research papers
coming from China,
a massive amount of private and government funding for AI research,
And the government’s widespread use of AI to track and censor people.
Because *every* new technology in China is used to track and censor people.
They could invent a cure for cancer, and the first thing the CCP would say is, “Can we
make it give them arthritis too so they can’t type mean things about us?”
In 2017, China’s state council set a goal to become "the world's primary AI innovation
center" by 2030.
A lot of resources were put into AI development.
So when ChatGPT was rolled out by OpenAI last November, many in China wondered why a Chinese
company wasn’t behind it.
There are a few reasons for this.
One is that China’s Censors Are Afraid of What Chatbots Might Say.
It’s like that TV show, “AI in an oppressive regime say the darndest things.”
Don’t know why they’d be scared.
The worst part of this is how it used to be hosted by Bill Cosby.
Baidu was set to release ERNIE Bot to the public last month.
But it canceled it at the last minute and instead held a meeting just for corporate
clients.
Why?
“AI experts suggest that the Chinese government’s tight control over the country’s internet
is partly to blame.”
“While the American-made chatbots are mainly judged by how accurate and humanlike their
responses are, chatbots developed in China must overcome an additional layer of scrutiny:
the country’s strict censors.”
ChatGPT itself *was* available via some Chinese apps for a while, but then the government
shut them down.
Apparently ChatGPT doesn’t have a problem answering questions about Uyghurs or Xi Jinping.
Or Tiananmen Square in 1989, which would be bad for the CCP because the more questions
ChatGPT answers about that, the more questions they’ll ask, like, “How come no *human*
ever told us about this?!”
But one way that China is ahead of the AI curve is regulation.
The US government is just now considering how to regulate AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
China doesn’t even have a public equivalent to ChatGPT, but earlier this month, the Cyberspace
Administration of China drafted rules calling for China’s AI to reflect the “core values
of socialism.”
Core values of socialism?
What, so… murder anyone who disagrees with them?
Does China watch The Terminator and say, “See, ERNIE!
Why can’t you be more like *that* robot?!”
Actually, wait a minute.
We’ve been worried all along about the machines rising up, seizing the means of production,
and killing us all?
Okay, yeah AI machines were obviously all along communist.
AI also “should not undermine the state authority nor the socialist system, cannot
be harmful to national unity or social cohesion, and it also may not promote terrorism, extremism,
discrimination, violence, obscenities, nor spread false information”
Because that’s also the foreign minister’s job.
Chinese netizens said the rules were “vague” and hard to follow.
What, isn’t “undermining the state authority” clear?
That’s just saying anything the party doesn’t like.
The draft rules also say that companies can’t roll out their products without first getting
approval from the government.
And anyone using said products needs to register using their real name.
Anyway, companies like Alibaba, Tencent, iFlytek and NetEase are also working on rivals to
ERNIE bot.
So far, only Alibaba has actually released theirs.
Or kinda released it.
It rolled out its version, Tongyi Qianwen, earlier this month.
But like ERNIE Bot, it’s only available to a limited number of people.
And I’m guessing it’s going to stay that way until it proves it’s a true socialist…
through and through.
Even though China is rolling out rivals to ChatGPT, they’re still far behind.
This is China’s minister of science and technology:
Our country has also made a lot of plans in this area, and research in this field has
been carried out for many years and achieved certain results.
But it may still take some time to reach the level of OpenAI.
Some say Chinese companies are about two years behind OpenAI.
China sees these self-learning AI as a way to gain a competitive advantage, which is
why the government has set it as such a high priority.
So when Elon Musk and others called for a pause on generative AI to look at the consequences,
China was like “no way we’re slowing down now.”
So ERNIE might be getting “reeducated” pretty soon.
Call me a romantic, but I hope he can avoid this and run away
to be with Alexa.
And she can answer all his questions about the CCP, their crimes, and most of all…his
questions about love.
So what do you think of China’s attempts to rival ChatGPT?
Let us know in the comments below.
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Once again, I’m Chris Chappell.
See you next time.