[HN Gopher] Beijing is enforcing tough rules to ensure chatbots ...
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Beijing is enforcing tough rules to ensure chatbots don't misbehave
no paywall: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/china-is-worried-ai-
threatens-pa...
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 58 points
Date : 2025-12-24 20:04 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Interesting but for a country like china with the fact that
| companies are partially-owned by CCP itself. I feel like most of
| these discussions would / (should?) have happened in a way where
| they don't leak outside.
|
| If the govt. formally anounces it, perhaps, I believe that they
| must have already taken appropriate action against it.
|
| Personally I believe that we are gonna see distills of large
| language models perhaps even with open weights Euro/American
| models filtering.
|
| I do feel like everybody knows seperation of concerns where
| nobody really asks about china to chinese models but I am a bit
| worried as recently I had just created if AI models can still
| push a chinese narrative in lets say if someone is creating
| another nation's related website or anything similar. I don't
| think that there would be that big of a deal about it and I will
| still use chinese models but an article like this definitely
| reduces china's influence overall
|
| America and Europe, please create open source / open weights
| models without censorship (like the gpt model) as a major
| concern. You already have intelligence like gemini flash so just
| open source something similar which can beat kimi/deepseek/glm
|
| Edit: Although thinking about it, I feel like the largest impact
| wouldn't be us outsiders but rather the people in china because
| they had access to chinese models but there would be very strict
| controls on even open weights model from america etc. there so if
| chinese models have propaganda it would most likely try to
| convince the average chinese with propagandization perhaps and I
| don't want to put a conspiracy hat on but if we do, I think that
| the chinese credit score can take a look at if people who are
| suspicious of the CCP ask it to chatbots on chinese chatbots.
| KlayLay wrote:
| Last time I checked, China's state-owned enterprises aren't all
| that invested in developing AI chatbots, so I imagine that the
| amount of control the central government has is about as much
| as their control over any tech company. If anything, China's AI
| industry has been described as under-regulated by people like
| Jensen Huang.
|
| A technology created by a certain set of people will naturally
| come to reflect the views of said people, even in areas where
| people act like it's neutral (e.g., cameras that are biased
| towards people with lighter skin). This is the case for all AI
| models--Chinese, American, European, etc.--so I wouldn't dub
| one that censors information they don't like as propaganda just
| because we like it, since we naturally have our own version of
| that.
|
| The actual chatbots, themselves, seem to be relatively useful.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Will these heavy-handed constraints ultimately stifle the very
| innovation China needs to compete with the U.S.? By forcing AI
| models to operate within a narrow ideological "sandbox," the
| government risks making its homegrown models less capable, less
| creative, and less useful than their Western counterparts,
| potentially causing China to fall behind in the most important
| technological race of the century. Will the western counterparts
| follow suit?
| Zetaphor wrote:
| I don't see how filtering the training data to exclude specific
| topics the CCP doesn't like would affect the capabilities of
| the model. The reason Chinese models are so competitive is
| because they're innovating on the architecture, not the
| training data.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Intelligence isn't a series of isolated silos. Modern AI
| capabilities (reasoning, logic, and creativity) often emerge
| from the cross-pollination of data. For the CCP, this move
| isn't just about stopping a chatbot from saying "Tiananmen
| Square." It's about the unpredictability of the technology.
| As models move toward Agentic AI, "control" shifts from "what
| it says" to "what it does." If the state cannot perfectly
| align the AI's "values" with the Party's, they risk creating
| a powerful tool that could be used by dissidents to automate
| subversion or bypass the Great Firewall. I feel the real
| question for China is: Can you have an AI that is smart
| enough to win a war or save an economy, but "dumb" enough to
| never question its master? If they tighten the leash too much
| to maintain control, the dog might never learn to hunt.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Imagine a model trained only on an Earth-centered universe,
| that there are four elements (earth, air, fire, and water),
| or one trained only that the world is flat. Would the
| capabilities of the resulting model equal those of models
| trained on a more robust set of scientific data?
|
| Architecture and training data both matter.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Pretty much all the Greek philosophers grew up in a world
| where the classical element model was widely accepted, yet
| they had reasoning skills that led them to develop theories
| of atomism, and measure the circumference of the earth.
| It'd be difficult to argue they were less capable than
| modern people who grew up learning the ideas they
| originated either.
|
| It doesn't seem impossible that models might also be able
| to learn reasoning beyond the limits of their training set.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean they came up with it then very slowly, they would
| quickly have to learn everything modern if they wanted to
| compete...
|
| Kind of a version of you don't have to run faster than
| the bear, you just have to run faster than the person
| beside you.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| I imagine trimming away 99.9% of _unwanted_ responses is not
| at all difficult at all and can be done without damaging
| model quality; pushing it further will result in degradation
| as you go to increasingly desperate lengths to make the model
| unaware, and _actively, constantly unwilling to be aware_ of
| certain inconvenient genocides here and there.
|
| Similarly, the leading models seem perfectly secure at first
| glance, but when you dig in they're susceptible to all kinds
| of prompt-based attacks, and the tail end seems quite
| daunting. They'll tell you how to build the bomby thingy if
| you ask the right question, despite all the work that goes
| into prohibiting that. Let's not even get into the topic of
| model uncensorship/abliteration and trying to block _that_.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Probably not.
|
| It's the arts, culture, politics and philosophies being
| kneecapped in the embeddings. Not really the physics,
| chemistry, and math.
|
| I could see them actually getting _more_ of what they want:
| which is Chinese people using these models to research hard
| sciences. All without having to carry the cost of "deadbeats"
| researching, say, the use of the cello in classical music.
| Because all of those prompts carry an energy cost.
|
| I don't know? I'm just thinking the people in charge over there
| probably don't want to shoulder the cost of a billion people
| looking into Faure for example. And this course of action kind
| of delivers to them added benefits of that nature.
| cherioo wrote:
| The west is already ahead on this. It is called AI safety and
| alignment.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| People laughing away the necessity for AI alignment are
| severely misaligned themselves; ironically enough, they very
| rarely represent the _capability frontier_.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > Will the western counterparts follow suit?
|
| Haven't some of them already? I seem to recall Grok being
| censored to follow several US gov-preferred viewpoints.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| This isn't surprising. They even enforced rules protecting
| Chinese government interests in the US TikTok company
| (https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-
| oaths...), so I would expect them to be tougher within their
| borders.
| bgwalter wrote:
| China has been more cautious the whole year. Xi has warned of an
| "AI" bubble, and "AI" was locked down during exam periods.
|
| More censorship and alignment will have the positive side effect
| that Western elites get jealous and also want to lock down
| chatbots. Which will then get so bad that no one is going to use
| them (great!).
|
| The current propaganda production is amazing. Half of Musk's
| retweets seem Grok generated tweets under different account
| names. Since most of responses to Musk are bots, too, it is hard
| to know what the public thinks of it.
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