ChatGPT grabs headlines but Chinese competitor to face censorship

• Published date: 28 February 2023
• Publication title: The Korea Times

As China's tech professionals returned to work after the week-long Lunar New Year holiday in January, the industry was immediately abuzz with talk about a new AI chat bot from San Francisco-based start-up OpenAI.

ChatGPT, a conversational bot that Microsoft-backed OpenAI unveiled in November, is able to understand sophisticated questions and give surprisingly humanlike text responses.

It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models and has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

Mainland users skirted the usual restrictions to set up accounts via VPN, and attempted to use the bot in various ways, including as a movie critic, career counsellor, for health and investment advice and in some cases as a dream interpreter.

The Chinese government also took note. A recent white paper published by the municipal technology bureau of Beijing - a city which is home to the largest cluster of Chinese AI start-ups - pledged to support local companies in developing ChatGPT rivals.

But this will be easier said than done, owing to differences in the structure of the English and Chinese languages, cost pressures, availability of data sets, and last but not least - the thorny issue of censorship in China.

China's ruling Communist Party has always strictly controlled the flow of political and social discourse within the country, and in recent times has cracked down heavily on online content that is deemed inappropriate, from betting and pornography to violence in games and content that promotes ideas that are "not in line with traditional Chinese values".

The 'Great Firewall' has long prevented Chinese netizens from accessing popular Western sites such as Google and Facebook. But AI chat bots pose a new challenge.

"Censorship could certainly hinder China's ability to develop a local equivalent to ChatGPT," said Dahlia Peterson, a research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).

"Even if [Chinese] AI companies are able to access and utilise global data and research resources to train their AI models, it is unlikely the Chinese authorities will allow them to use any material deemed as politically sensitive in their replies," she added.

Even if a Chinese rival to ChatGPT is developed, the government's tight grip on content could also put a lid on its commercialisation.

"Excessive restrictions, content regulation, and censorship could hinder commercialisation and further innovation of...