ChatCCP: how will China cope with AI?

The Chinese Communist party faces a conundrum: it wants to lead the world in artificial intelligence and yet it is terrified of anything with a mind of its own. Chinese regulators have reportedly told domestic tech companies not to offer their users ChatGPT, the Microsoft-funded chatbot that can provide seemingly well-researched answers to pretty much any question you can think to ask it. China Daily, a CCP mouthpiece, has admitted that the technology has already gone ‘viral’ in China. The paper said that AI could give ‘a helping hand to the US government in its spread of disinformation and its manipulation of global narratives for its own geopolitical interests’.

That’s a problem because ‘spreading disinformation’ and manipulating ‘global narratives’ is exactly what the CCP wants its own, Chinese-developed AIs to be able to do. The party needs to be sure that its chatbots are on message – that they are conditioned to spew party propaganda on cue, sidestep politically awkward questions and generally steer clear of anything deemed contentious.