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Beijing is enforcing tough rules to ensure chatbots don’t misbehave

76 points by bookofjoe

by dingody

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Whenever I see topics about China on HN, I get this strong sense of unease. The reality is that most people don't actually understand China; when they think of it, they just imagine a country where 'people work like expressionless machines under the CCP’s high-pressure rule.' In truth, a nation of 1.4 billion is far more diverse than people imagine, and the public discourse and civic consciousness here are much more complex. Chinese people aren't 'brainwashed'; they’ve simply accepted a different political system—one that certainly has its share of problems, but also its benefits. But that’s not the whole story. You shouldn't try to link every single topic back to the political system. Look at the other, more interesting things going on.

by stevenjgarner

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Will these heavy-handed constraints ultimately stifle the very innovation China needs to compete with the U.S.? By forcing AI models to operate within a narrow ideological "sandbox," the government risks making its homegrown models less capable, less creative, and less useful than their Western counterparts, potentially causing China to fall behind in the most important technological race of the century. Will the western counterparts follow suit?

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by SilverElfin

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This isn’t surprising. They even enforced rules protecting Chinese government interests in the US TikTok company (https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...), so I would expect them to be tougher within their borders.

by c0nstantien

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[dead]

by bgwalter

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China has been more cautious the whole year. Xi has warned of an "AI" bubble, and "AI" was locked down during exam periods.
More censorship and alignment will have the positive side effect that Western elites get jealous and also want to lock down chatbots. Which will then get so bad that no one is going to use them (great!).
The current propaganda production is amazing. Half of Musk's retweets seem Grok generated tweets under different account names. Since most of responses to Musk are bots, too, it is hard to know what the public thinks of it.

by Imustaskforhelp

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Interesting but for a country like china with the fact that companies are partially-owned by CCP itself. I feel like most of these discussions would / (should?) have happened in a way where they don't leak outside.
If the govt. formally anounces it, perhaps, I believe that they must have already taken appropriate action against it.
Personally I believe that we are gonna see distills of large language models perhaps even with open weights Euro/American models filtering.
I do feel like everybody knows seperation of concerns where nobody really asks about china to chinese models but I am a bit worried as recently I had just created if AI models can still push a chinese narrative in lets say if someone is creating another nation's related website or anything similar. I don't think that there would be that big of a deal about it and I will still use chinese models but an article like this definitely reduces china's influence overall
America and Europe, please create open source / open weights models without censorship (like the gpt model) as a major concern. You already have intelligence like gemini flash so just open source something similar which can beat kimi/deepseek/glm
Edit: Although thinking about it, I feel like the largest impact wouldn't be us outsiders but rather the people in china because they had access to chinese models but there would be very strict controls on even open weights model from america etc. there so if chinese models have propaganda it would most likely try to convince the average chinese with propagandization perhaps and I don't want to put a conspiracy hat on but if we do, I think that the chinese credit score can take a look at if people who are suspicious of the CCP ask it to chatbots on chinese chatbots.