Language Log

"China deploys censors to create socialist AI:  Large language models are being tested by officials to ensure their systems ‘embody core socialist values’", by Ryan McMorrow and Tina Hu in Beijing, Financial Times (July 17 2024)

Chinese government officials are testing artificial intelligence companies’ large language models to ensure their systems “embody core socialist values”, in the latest expansion of the country’s censorship regime.

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), a powerful internet overseer, has forced large tech companies and AI start-ups including ByteDance, Alibaba, Moonshot and 01.AI to take part in a mandatory government review of their AI models, according to multiple people involved in the process.

The effort involves batch-testing an LLM’s responses to a litany of questions, according to those with knowledge of the process, with many of them related to China’s political sensitivities and its President Xi Jinping.

Chapter 1

A professor in China who is collaborating with a famous American professor of Chinese literature wanted to read one of my Language Log (LL) posts because he had heard that it's being widely discussed around the world.  However, because of China's rigid censorship rules, he couldn't open the LL post.

The Chinese professor asked the American professor to help him gain access to my post.

The American professor asked me to help the Chinese professor.

I suggested to the Chinese professor to use a VPN.  Without a VPN, Chinese are not able to access LL, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Google, X, etc., etc.  In other words, without a VPN, Chinese are cut off from most of the information on the internet that is outside the Great Firewall, i.e., most of the cutting edge, valuable information in the world.

The Catch 22 is that it is a crime to use a VPN in China.

Can you imagine having to live in a benighted place like the PRC?

"China Puts Power of State Behind AI—and Risks Strangling It:  Government support helps China’s generative AI companies gain ground on U.S. competitors, but political controls threaten to weigh them down", by Lia Lin, WSJ (7/16/24)

Screenshot of emails circulating on social media:

In a country like China that is drenched in censorship, people who have opinions that differ from those of the government resort to any means possible to get their message across.

"Bookstores Become Sites of Subtle Protest Against Xi Jinping", by Alexander Boyd, China Digital Times (7/18/24)

The novel “Changing of the Guard” displayed at left, alongside “Study Outline for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”

Things are becoming dicey for the CCP/PRC regime:

"A cartoon cat has been vexing China’s censors – now he says they are on his tail"

By Tessa Wong, Asia Digital Reporter, BBC (6/10/24)

Here's the dilemma faced by the Chinese communist authorities.   It would be very easy for the censors to shut down all VPNs and invoke strictly draconian internet controls that would make it impossible for netizens to communicate with the outside internet.  But that would mean that China would no longer have access to external information and communication, which the government desperately needs if they are going to continue to acquire advanced technology and science from abroad, not to mention operate their economic initiatives such as BRI (Belt and Road Initiative).

We have expressed concern over the quality of training and source materials for Chinese AI and LLMs.  Less than a week ago, we examined "AI based on Xi Jinping Thought (5/21/24), which may be considered as an attempt to "purify" what goes into Chinese AI.  It turns out that there really is a problem, and it is affecting not just China's own AI efforts, but is infecting ours as well.

OpenAI’s latest blunder shows the challenges facing Chinese AI models:
Finding high-quality data sets is tricky because of the way China’s internet functions.
By Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review (May 22, 2024)

As we shall soon see, pursuing this topic takes us into very sensitive, disquieting territory concerning the nature of China's internet.  It will be difficult for us to avoid assessing the quality of China's knowledge basis and information resources overall.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the MIT Technology Review article by Zeyi Yang:

Basic background, from Wikipedia:

The Three-Body Problem (Chinese: 三体; lit. 'Three-Body') is a story by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin which became the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy—though the series as a whole is often referred to as The Three-Body Problem, or simply as Three-Body. The series portrays a fictional past, present and future wherein Earth encounters an alien civilization from a nearby system of three sun-like stars orbiting one another, a representative example of the three-body problem in orbital mechanics.

Nectar Gan, "Netflix blockbuster ‘3 Body Problem’ divides opinion and sparks nationalist anger in China", CNN 3/22/2024:

A Netflix adaptation of wildly popular Chinese sci-fi novel “The Three-Body Problem” has split opinions in China and sparked online nationalist anger over scenes depicting a violent and tumultuous period in the country’s modern history.

From a memoir by Uyghur poet Tamir Hamut Izgil, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, Bruce Humes posted on his Ethnic ChinaLit blog (12/30/23) this brief excerpt about how content, once commissioned and approved by the Chinese state, became grounds for incarceration of researchers, writers and editors:

Huítóu kàn gōngchéng 回头看工程 — Xinjiang’s Ominous “Looking Back Project”

Uyghur poet’s memoir recalls the Xinjiang administration’s retroactive hunt for unPC content in textbooks once commissioned, edited and published by the state:

Subtitle:  "Thank you, Egg Fried Rice"

You may think that nothing could be more innocuous than mundane egg-fried rice.  Not so in post-Mao China.  As background for the story I'm about to tell, you need to know that eggs were a rarity in the PRC during the days of Mao, and especially during the Korean War (1950-53), in which China was pitted against the USA and the UN.

So you know the vocabulary, it is "dàn chǎo fàn 蛋炒饭" ("egg fried rice"). 

Egg Fried Rice

What is said to have killed Mao Zedong’s oldest son, Mao Anying. The younger Mao, who had studied abroad in Russia, volunteered to fight in the Korean War and was assigned to be Peng Dehuai*’s Russian translator. According to legend, Mao Anying cooked fried rice with eggs in the daytime, against military regulation. The eggs were a rare delicacy at the time and had been just been sent to Peng Dehuai from Kim Il-sung. Spotting the smoke from the fire, an American plane dropped napalm on the site. Unable to escape, Mao perished in the flames.

Regardless of the truth of the story, Mao Anying did in fact die in 1950 when his camp in a Korean cave was napalmed.

"Hurting the feelings of the Chinese people", part 572

From AntC:

As things seem to be spinning out of control in the PRC (generals, bankers, politicians being disappeared left and right; foreign ministers evaporating; a former president being levitated out of his seat at the 20th National Congress; a much-admired premier being heart attacked…), people are increasingly desperate to get out.  We saw this already in the "RUN" phenomenon of more than a year ago during the fallacious Zero Covid nightmare:

"RUNning away from Shanghai" (5/13/22)

"RUN = wrong" (9/29/22)

But now the tempo and anxiety level of those wishing to flee seem to be exponentially increasing, as indicated in this startling report:

China Quickly Removes the Word “Emigrate” from Search Rankings

"Hebei official’s shirt logo removed for ‘aesthetic reasons,’ triggering speculation among netizens"

By Global Times (Sep 05, 2023)

Official photos of a city Party chief in North China's Hebei Province, with his shirt's logo removed by editing, have sparked a wide-ranging discussion among Chinese netizens, with some speculating that it was a move to obscure the price of the clothing. 

In an article posted via Nangong city's official WeChat account on Sunday, the official's daily work was released, with one picture of his shirt logo in, followed by another two pictures without shirt logo. Some netizens questioned the reasons why they removed the shirt logo, and some checked the similar coat prices online discovering the high retail price for the item, according to media reports.