Thomas Friedman of the NYTimes has just been to Beijing. Among other things he reports:
Indeed, a story making the rounds in Beijing is that many Chinese have begun using ChatGPT to do their ideology homework for the local Communist Party cell, so they don’t have to waste time on it.
The article continues:
It’s funny, though — just when you start to worry about the state of J.F.K. Airport, and all the stories in recent years that China was going to bury us in the race to A.I., an American team, OpenAI, comes up with the world’s leading natural language processing tool, which enables any user to have humanlike conversations, ask any question and get deep insights in every major language, including Mandarin.
China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.
But generative A.I., like ChatGPT, gives anyone, from a poor farmer to a college professor, the power to ask any question on any subject in his or her own language. This could be a real problem for China, because it will have to build many guardrails into its own generative A.I. systems to limit what Chinese citizens can ask and what the computer can answer. If you can’t ask whatever you want, including what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, and if your A.I. system is always trying to figure out what to censor, where to censor and whom to censor, it will be less productive.
“ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,” Dingding Chen, a Chinese political scientist, told me and Bradsher.
It’s for all of these reasons that weighing the shifting power relationship between America and China has become such a popular pastime among elites in both of our countries. For instance, through social media, many Chinese got to see parts of the March 23rd hearing on Capitol Hill where members of Congress questioned — or, actually, berated, harangued and constantly interrupted — TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Chew, claiming TikTok’s videos were damaging American children’s mental health.
Hu Xijin, one of China’s most popular bloggers, with almost 25 million followers on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, explained to me just how insulting Chinese found that hearing. It was widely and derisively commented about online in China.
(All that said, YouTube has been banned from China since 2009, so we’re not the only ones frightened by popular apps. I say we trade: We’ll accept TikTok if Beijing will let in YouTube.)
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