CHINA has reportedly immortalised President Xi Jinping and his values in the form of an artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbot.
The chatbot has been trained on the thoughts and beliefs of President Xi, according to the Financial Times, while citizens are blocked from using US rivals like ChatGPT.
It is the country’s newest large language model, as Beijing goes toe-to-toe with the White House for AI market dominance.
The chatbot, cleverly dubbed ‘Chat Xi PT’, has been fed literature provided by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) regulatory body, the Financial Times reported, citing a person involved in the project.
The CAC has spearheaded the country’s rule-setting for the use of generative AI and what it’s capable of.
The watchdog stipulates that generative AI bots, like those created by Chinese firms Alibaba and Baidu, “embody core socialist values” and cannot “contain any content that subverts state power”.
For example, both Alibaba and Baidu’s chatbots typically ask users to restart the conversation when pressed about sensitive topics.
Generative AI is a term that is regularly thrown around these days. So, let's break it down:
The term refers to a form of AI that can generate high-quality text, images, and even videos, from prompts given to it by humans.
They are able to do so because they are built on giant data sets, called large language models (LLMs), which are often made up of at least one billion pieces of separate information.
Chatbots will essentially regurgitate the data it has been trained on over and over again, in different forms, depending on the question.
When an AI bot can’t answer a question of yours, or facilitate an action, this is because it has reached the extent of its knowledge.
It can, however, learn through more data training.
China’s strict rules mean that homegrown large language models cannot be trained on English language-based data sets.
Otherwise their chatbots may pick up on values deemed too Western.
Instead, the new model has been trained on a data set that draws heavily from government regulations, as well as policy and state media reports.
President Xi is mentioned an eyewatering 86,314 times in these documents.
A line in one of the documents says chatbots must “ensure that in thought, politics, and action, we are always in high alignment with the Party Central Committee with General Secretary Xi Jinping at its core.”
Another says: “Let us unite more closely around the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core.”
It can answer questions as President Xi, as well as create reports, summarise information, and translate between Chinese and English.
So-called ‘Chat Xi PT’ is currently only being used at a research centre under the powerful internet regulator.
However, it may be released to the public in future.
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