6 ms·

Beijing is enforcing tough rules to ensure chatbots don’t misbehave

83 points by bookofjoe 11mo ago

no paywall: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/china-is-worried-ai-threatens-party-ruleand-is-trying-to-tame-it-bfdcda2d?st=nKj1Wq&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/china-is-worried-ai-threatens-pa...

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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.
  - Workaccount2 11mo ago
    China is a communist country, every company is defacto under the states control. It might not feel like that on the ground, the leash has been getting looser, but the leash is still 100% there. Don't make the childish mistake of thinking China is just USA 2.0
    - Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
      Agreed, my point was that the leash was there so most likely if the news gets released to the public, it means that they must have definitely used "that leash" a lot privately too so the news might/does have a deeper impact than one might think but it can be hidden. So like even now although I can trust chinese models, who knows for how long their private discussions have been happening and for how long chinese govt has been using that leash privately and for chatbots like glm 4.7 and similar. I am not sure why china would actively come out and say they are enforcing tough rules tho, doesn't make much sense for a country who loves being private.
    - _DeadFred_ 11mo ago
      I stress about China because I'm pushed to. But I feel like we're all getting caught up and letting things go ways they shouldn't. 10 years ago when I did some work in China the companies were privately owned and just had a party member or two inside. It was different, but not what I had built up in my head. We went to some singing and drinking things, and the party members were just normal humans with normal human motivation when you got them to talk after a few drinks. Hell the ones I met were educated in the USA. The damage internet discourse is doing between us all frankly seems the worst threat. Look at the H1B discourse. We hate a shitty American policy abused by AMERICAN companies, yet it gets turned against humans who happen to be from India. We gotta not do that. We gotta not let things between China and us get so out of control. This is going to sound America hating but look at how people see us Americans, it's not good. But we know we aren't as bad as they say. China has done things anathema to me. But the US has too. We have to work outside that. We have to. We have to. We have to get out of this feedback loop. We have to be adults and not play this emotional ping-pong.
stevenjgarner 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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.
    - Workaccount2 11mo ago
      They will disappear a full lab once there is a model with gross transgressions. They won't comment on it, but the message will be abundantly clear to the other labs: only make models that align with the state.
    - tzs 11mo ago
SilverElfin 11mo ago
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-china-socialist-system-court-documents/ https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...), so I would expect them to be tougher within their borders.
bgwalter 11mo ago
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.
c0nstantien 11mo ago
[dead]
dingody 11mo ago
Whenever I see topics about China on HN, I get this strong sense of unease. The reality is that most people don't actually understand China; when they think of it, they just imagine a country where 'people work like expressionless machines under the CCP’s high-pressure rule.' In truth, a nation of 1.4 billion is far more diverse than people imagine, and the public discourse and civic consciousness here are much more complex. Chinese people aren't 'brainwashed'; they’ve simply accepted a different political system—one that certainly has its share of problems, but also its benefits. But that’s not the whole story. You shouldn't try to link every single topic back to the political system. Look at the other, more interesting things going on.
- checker659 11mo ago
  I’m not Chinese but I think people need a crutch to help them cope. Easy explanations are clutch.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 11mo ago
    That's very true but one doesn't exclude the other. The attitude of individual Chinese is not just complex but also non-uniform; trying to describe it with one work is ridiculous. This doesn't change the fact that China is an autocratic country and many of its citizens are susceptible to its propaganda. (Yes, propaganda is present in all countries, but if you eliminate all opposing voices, the pendulum dangerously sweeps towards one side.)
    - checker659 11mo ago
      Absolutely. I just wanted to point out the fact that doing so is a symptom of lazy thinking. On one hand, it might be hurtful to the Chinese people. On the other hand, complacency and denial can be harmful. It's easy to brush off your competitors only to find yourself in a tortoise/hare type situation.
    - 0xpiguy 11mo ago
      That is a very common misconception. There are plenty opposing voices. They just prefer the resolve these behind close doors. Even within party, there are different factions competing and influencing policy making.
yunahacknew 11mo ago
i was a chinese, the real problem of china is people, smart people dont want to be slave of CCP, and some of them cant stand CCP fXXk their mind, so they leave, like manus. but the badly thing is : the rest, if they are smart, then they must be smart and evil
_nub3 11mo ago
https://archive.is/gDvhC https://archive.is/gDvhC

83 points by bookofjoe 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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.
- Workaccount2 11mo ago
  China is a communist country, every company is defacto under the states control. It might not feel like that on the ground, the leash has been getting looser, but the leash is still 100% there. Don't make the childish mistake of thinking China is just USA 2.0
  - Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
    Agreed, my point was that the leash was there so most likely if the news gets released to the public, it means that they must have definitely used "that leash" a lot privately too so the news might/does have a deeper impact than one might think but it can be hidden. So like even now although I can trust chinese models, who knows for how long their private discussions have been happening and for how long chinese govt has been using that leash privately and for chatbots like glm 4.7 and similar. I am not sure why china would actively come out and say they are enforcing tough rules tho, doesn't make much sense for a country who loves being private.
  - _DeadFred_ 11mo ago
    I stress about China because I'm pushed to. But I feel like we're all getting caught up and letting things go ways they shouldn't. 10 years ago when I did some work in China the companies were privately owned and just had a party member or two inside. It was different, but not what I had built up in my head. We went to some singing and drinking things, and the party members were just normal humans with normal human motivation when you got them to talk after a few drinks. Hell the ones I met were educated in the USA. The damage internet discourse is doing between us all frankly seems the worst threat. Look at the H1B discourse. We hate a shitty American policy abused by AMERICAN companies, yet it gets turned against humans who happen to be from India. We gotta not do that. We gotta not let things between China and us get so out of control. This is going to sound America hating but look at how people see us Americans, it's not good. But we know we aren't as bad as they say. China has done things anathema to me. But the US has too. We have to work outside that. We have to. We have to. We have to get out of this feedback loop. We have to be adults and not play this emotional ping-pong.

stevenjgarner 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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.
  - Workaccount2 11mo ago
    They will disappear a full lab once there is a model with gross transgressions. They won't comment on it, but the message will be abundantly clear to the other labs: only make models that align with the state.
  - tzs 11mo ago

SilverElfin 11mo ago

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-china-socialist-system-court-documents/ https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...), so I would expect them to be tougher within their borders.

bgwalter 11mo ago

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.

c0nstantien 11mo ago

[dead]

dingody 11mo ago

Whenever I see topics about China on HN, I get this strong sense of unease. The reality is that most people don't actually understand China; when they think of it, they just imagine a country where 'people work like expressionless machines under the CCP’s high-pressure rule.' In truth, a nation of 1.4 billion is far more diverse than people imagine, and the public discourse and civic consciousness here are much more complex. Chinese people aren't 'brainwashed'; they’ve simply accepted a different political system—one that certainly has its share of problems, but also its benefits. But that’s not the whole story. You shouldn't try to link every single topic back to the political system. Look at the other, more interesting things going on.

checker659 11mo ago
I’m not Chinese but I think people need a crutch to help them cope. Easy explanations are clutch.
- dvfjsdhgfv 11mo ago
  That's very true but one doesn't exclude the other. The attitude of individual Chinese is not just complex but also non-uniform; trying to describe it with one work is ridiculous. This doesn't change the fact that China is an autocratic country and many of its citizens are susceptible to its propaganda. (Yes, propaganda is present in all countries, but if you eliminate all opposing voices, the pendulum dangerously sweeps towards one side.)
  - checker659 11mo ago
    Absolutely. I just wanted to point out the fact that doing so is a symptom of lazy thinking. On one hand, it might be hurtful to the Chinese people. On the other hand, complacency and denial can be harmful. It's easy to brush off your competitors only to find yourself in a tortoise/hare type situation.
  - 0xpiguy 11mo ago
    That is a very common misconception. There are plenty opposing voices. They just prefer the resolve these behind close doors. Even within party, there are different factions competing and influencing policy making.

yunahacknew 11mo ago

i was a chinese, the real problem of china is people, smart people dont want to be slave of CCP, and some of them cant stand CCP fXXk their mind, so they leave, like manus. but the badly thing is : the rest, if they are smart, then they must be smart and evil

_nub3 11mo ago

https://archive.is/gDvhC https://archive.is/gDvhC