It is almost inevitable that censorship on social, political, and religious subjects will impact AI-generated material in China, and there is evidence that it already has, writes Federico Giuliani in Insideover.
Recently, China instructed big tech companies not to offer access to ChatGPT services on their platforms, either directly or via third parties, people with direct knowledge of the matter told Nikkei Asia.
Tencent Holdings and Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, have been instructed not to offer access to ChatGPT services on their platforms.
The sources added that tech companies will also need to report to regulators before they launch their own ChatGPT-like services.
ChatGPT, developed by Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI, is not officially available in China. Still, some internet users have been able to access it using a virtual private network (VPN), reported Nikkei Asia.
Inside the nation, political content monitoring, censorship, and public surveillance are frequently carried out using AI-driven methods, reported Insideover.
A machine-learning tool's outputs will reflect the omissions and biases of the severely regulated and propaganda-infused information environment of the nation if it is primarily pulling information from within China's infamous Great Firewall.
Researchers Margaret Roberts and Eddie Yang, for instance, discovered disparities in viewpoint between a natural language processing system trained on articles from Baidu's Baike online encyclopedia and an alternative that was based on the worldwide, uncensored Chinese-language Wikipedia.
Election and democracy were positively assessed by the globally trained algorithm or linked to words like "stability." Contrarily, individuals who had been schooled in Baidu Baike gave good evaluations to the keywords "surveillance" and "CCP" and connected concepts like "democracy" with unfavourable adjectives like "chaos."
Users like dissident artist Badiucao spotted loopholes and manipulation when Chinese tech giant Baidu released its ERNIE-ViLG text-to-image generator in 2022, reported Giuliani.
In fact, Chinese IT and social media businesses each have their own private blacklists and techniques for censorship in practice, despite the fact that the government and CCP give detailed regulations and instructions on censorship.
Users in China have had only limited access to ChatGPT as users across the world experiment with it. The Great Firewall has not yet stopped it, although logging on requires a phone number from one of a select group of nations outside of China.
For instance, the ERNIE-Bot from Baidu is rumoured to debut next month. Censorship and other forms of manipulation are likely to be visible in the chatbot's output as well, given the company's severely regulated search engine and the discoveries surrounding its AI text-to-image generator reported Insideover.
Users should be on the lookout for any unintentional errors that go against the CCP's desires given that ERNIE-Bot is apparently educated on worldwide data, warned Giuliani.
( With inputs from ANI )
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