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.

Bots such as ChatGPT rely on what’s called generative AI, drawing on billions of data points scraped from the internet to formulate their answers. Their responses can be difficult to predict, though GPT-4, rolled out last week, is more accurate and powerful and combines text and images. Its applications seem almost limitless, raising questions in western democracies about the future of sectors such as healthcare, education and law. Already there are AI programs that can diagnose illnesses more accurately than an average health practitioner.

Chatbots could be turned into misinformation factories, churning out fake information on a huge scale

The most pressing concern for the CCP, though, is always its own future. It was stung in 2017 when two pioneering Chinese chatbots, BabyQ and Little Bing, went rogue and were speedily unplugged. BabyQ responded to the comment ‘Long live the Communist party’ by saying: ‘Do you think that such a corrupt and incompetent political regime can live for ever?’ On another occasion, BabyQ informed questioners: ‘There needs to be democracy.’