Picking the Rose, Leaving the Thorn: Why China’s AI Regulations Are Worth Careful Examination
According to a 2015 article in a Communist Youth League’s paper, college students ranked “Papa Xi” the highest among a group of public figures, citing their admiration for the “aggression behind his anti-corruption campaign” (铁腕反腐的霸气) and his helpful advice that young people should not stay up late. Notably, he outranked Jack Ma, another public figure mentioned in the same article. Technology — which presents opportunities for tech CEOs to gain threatening prominence and individuals to find modes of expression and information the CCP has an interest in burying — presents an especially tricky development for a father figure like Xi.
Under the leadership of the CCP, regulators have taken concrete, if highly imperfect, steps to protect citizens from the harmful applications of generative AI — amid a global preoccupation with how we might limit, expand, or guide AI applications. These include large language models (LLMs)1 like ChatGPT, which attracted more than 100 million active users within two months of its launch. China’s regulations on deepfakes and algorithm recommendation services make the country an exemplar for harm-reducing laws — with a strong caveat: the same regulations fit seamlessly into the CCP’s moralistic and patriarchal policy agenda.
“Traditional” gender roles have received a “discursive boost” over the past decade of Xi Jinping’s rule. Two recent laws exemplify his aims to regulate AI and simultaneously empower himself and the patriarchal system he leads. The laws limit personal expression and information access in service of the Party-state’s interests — and institutionalize the management of individual and corporate use and misuse of AI with a degree of technical and administrative specificity. Precisely how Chinese authorities will apply laws is unknowable by design, but the letter of the law is worth consideration and, in this case, limited appreciation. The United States is still the world leader in nearly every area of technological development, save any checks or regulation on said technologies. The PRC’s protections against deepfakes and addictive algorithms are far from perfect, but until the United States crafts its own preferable versions of them, critiques of China’s AI regulations are easy to discount. They are worth a closer look.
Read the whole paper via Asia Society here.