‘ChatXiPT, the Chinese artificial intelligence that reflects Xi Jinping Thought’
The new artificial intelligence (AI) developed by China’s cyberspace academy has an answer for everything… as long as it’s about Xi Jinping Thought. On Monday, May 20, the state institution announced on social media that it had developed this new chatbot, quickly dubbed “ChatXiPT” by the media.
It is initially intended for internal use by Chinese specialists in the internet and its control. It merges seven databases: six on technology and one on “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” the president’s doctrinal corpus, which was incorporated into the Constitution in 2018.
Suggested research: State the difference between traditional productive forces and “new productive forces,” the current leitmotif of the head of the party-state to revive the economy by focusing on the sectors of the future.
The “ChatXiPT” example is over the top. There are other AI programs in China inspired by ChatGPT, for use by the general public, that are not inclined toward communist ideology and work on innocuous topics, even if they systematically dodge the issue when sensitive themes are raised. This new LLM (large language model) does, however, raise the question of whether a country with ever-tightening control over ideas can lead the way in AI and become the dominant technological power, as Beijing hopes.
The difficulty is real for Chinese developers: The authorities want to understand how the product works well in advance, which adds months of procedures. As a result, it takes a long time to bring a product to market, and AIs have no room for political error. As with the emergence of forums, and then messaging apps from web giants (Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba), the responsibility for ensuring that nothing forbidden appears lies first and foremost with the entrepreneurs: They must be quick to “clean up” if they intend to continue to profit from this crucial market.
Tensions with the US
Things get more complicated with AI. It’s not just a question of integrating a list of taboo words and rebooting the connection when a banned term is typed. It’s now a matter of generating responses in agreement with what those in power demand, especially when the Communist Party leadership wants to remobilize society around the values dear to Xi.
On one side of the coin, there’s this ever-tightening constraint that doesn’t encourage risk-taking when it comes to content creation. What’s more, growing tensions with the US, the current center of AI innovation, have prohibited Nvidia, the champion of cutting-edge microchips, from delivering its latest models to China, while China also wants to cut itself off from Wall Street, whose financial depth and appetite for risk facilitate technological innovation.
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