An AI (Artificial Intelligence) placard is seen at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China on July 6, 2023. Aly SongReuters
China on Thursday announced new regulations for Generative AI, the technology that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbots. The rules will govern every publicly available chatbot and will be overseen by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s top internet regulator. Generative AI research and technologies developed for use in other countries are exempt from the regulations.
Major Chinese tech companies, such as Alibaba and Baidu, among others, have yet to release their generative AI tools for public use. Experts believe they were waiting for the government to publish their final regulations before doing so. (Although Thursday’s policies are titled Interim Measures, leaving open the possibility of imminent changes.) Chinese versions of AI chatbots and image generators are still in development or being trialled by B2B customers reports CNN. Alibaba, for example, last week released a text-to-image generator called Tongyi Wanxiang, which is still only available for beta testing for enterprise customers. And Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant, released its Ernie chatbot in March to just about 650 enterprise cloud customers.
Developers will also have to register their algorithms with the Chinese government and undergo a security assessment if their services are deemed to have social mobilization capabilities capable of influencing public opinion, a policy that appears, at least initially, in in line with existing Chinese censorship efforts of online conversations.
The new law presents a general requirement to adhere to the fundamental values โโof socialism. That same section of the rulebook goes on to outline a litany of illegal uses of generative AI, some intended to protect citizens (a ban on the promotion of terrorism and the dissemination of obscene pornography) and others intended to tighten government control over nascent technology, tech companies and users should not use generative AI. TO subvert state power, damage the country’s image and undermine national unity.
Domestic national security concerns related to artificial intelligence have been echoed at the highest levels of the Chinese government. At a meeting in May, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a new development model with a new security architecture to address the complicated and difficult circumstances AI has posed for national security, PBS reported.
The Thursday rules were drafted by the CAC but have been approved by seven other agencies including the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Public Security and the State General Administration of Radio and Television, according to the CAC website. The involvement of such a wide range of state agencies lends credence to the notion that the government hopes AI will be used by virtually every sector in the country, something also outlined in the new policy. The new regulations come amid an AI arms race between China and the United States Last December, Chinese officials identified AI development as a 2023 economic priority at the government’s annual Central Economic Work Conference , Fortunes reported Nicholas Gordon.
Chinese regulations offer guidance for AI regulations
Thursday’s regulations were an updated version of preliminary guidelines released in April that were deemed too restrictive by tech companies. Now they offer a blueprint to the US and other countries on how to address some of the hot button issues surrounding generative AI, including possible copyright infringement and data protection.
They include some of the world’s first explicit requirements that intellectual property rights must be respected by AI companies. The topic was recently brought to the fore in the US when comedian Sarah Silverman sued OpenAI and Meta for using her copyrighted work to train their machine learning models.
The new CAC policy also sought to outline certain privacy rights for individual users. Generative AI platforms in China will be responsible for protecting personal information in case users disclose it while using the services. And if companies intend to collect or store otherwise protected information, they will need to offer terms of service to users to clarify the rights they have when using the platform. The terms of service are widely used with technology applications ranging from social media to app stores, but are not yet mandated by law for AI platforms in the United States, according to a congressional report in May. Additionally, all existing Chinese privacy protection laws will also apply to artificial intelligence, according to regulations released by the CAC. These provisions may be particularly illustrative for the United States, which does not currently have comprehensive data protection law.
The recently released measures also offer clues about China’s global ambitions with regards to AI and in particular the policies that will eventually be used to regulate its use around the world. Developers and suppliers, such as chip makers, have been encouraged to participate in formulating international rules related to generative artificial intelligence, under the new laws.
The idea of โโa Chinese desire for global regulations has been beaten in the past, most recently by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. He predicted on Wednesday that China would be open to a cooperative international framework for AI regulation, something he says he discussed with officials during his recent visit to China.
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