China’s latest artificial intelligence chatbot is trained on President Xi Jinping’s doctrine in a stark reminder of the ideological parameters that Chinese AI models should abide by.
I know that this kind of actually critical perspective isn't point of this article, but software always reflects the ideology of the power structure in which it was built. I actually covered something very similar in my most recent post, where I applied Philip Agre's analysis of the so-called Internet Revolution to the AI hype, but you can find many similar analyses all over STS literature, or throughout just Agre's work, which really ought to be required reading for anyone in software.
edit to add some recommendations: If you think of yourself as a tech person, and don't necessarily get or enjoy the humanities (for lack of a better word), I recommend starting here, where Agre discusses his own "critical awakening."
As an AI practitioner already well immersed in the literature, I had incorporated the field's taste for technical formalization so thoroughly into my own cognitive style that I literally could not read the literatures of nontechnical fields at anything beyond a popular level. The problem was not exactly that I could not understand the vocabulary, but that I insisted on trying to read everything as a narration of the workings of a mechanism. By that time much philosophy and psychology had adopted intellectual styles similar to that of AI, and so it was possible to read much that was congenial -- except that it reproduced the same technical schemata as the AI literature. I believe that this problem was not simply my own -- that it is characteristic of AI in general (and, no doubt, other technical fields as well). T
We'd probably be fucked, but it'd be interesting to see. The professed ideology of the Chinese state is very different from their actual actions -- for example, they mandate study of texts by Marx and Lenin that advocate for worker-controlled militant labor organizing while at the same time banning any non-state-controlled unions. An actually Marxist AI might turn on them lmao
Good. It will finally put to rest the "not real communism" argument when a superintelligent AI finally figures out how to make it work without bloodshed or oppression and turns on all the tankies. I'll be waiting with the popcorn.
HONG KONG (AP) — China’s latest artificial intelligence chatbot is trained on President Xi Jinping’s doctrine, in a stark reminder of the ideological parameters that Chinese AI models should abide by.
China’s cyberspace academy earlier this week announced the chatbot trained on Xi Jinping Thought, a doctrine which promotes “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Xi Jinping Thought was the seventh database that the chatbot was trained on, according to a WeChat messaging service post by CAC’s magazine about the AI model.
The Xi-trained large language model is the latest effort by authorities to spread the Chinese leader’s ideology and ideas.
China’s access to a population of 1.4 billion also allows the country to amass troves of data to train systems for facial recognition and autonomous driving.
Technology firms such as Alibaba and Baidu have already rolled out primarily Chinese-language AI models similar to ChatGPT for public and commercial use.
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