China’s answer to OpenAI is a Xi Jinping chatbot

Good morning. Clay Chandler here, writing from Hong Kong.

Last week I noted that the world’s two big AI superpowers seem to be running the global AI arms race in opposite directions. U.S. lawmakers have balked at imposing even the most minimal restrictions on fast-moving new technologies. China, meanwhile, has established a dense regulatory framework for AI designed to eliminate all possible risks.

Those differences become even more starkly apparent this week.

In the U.S., of course, everyone is aghast at Scarlett Johansson’s allegation that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman used a voice “eerily” similar to hers for Sky, the chatbot mode featured in OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT upgrade. Few are buying Altman’s insistence that he “never intended” the chatbot to resemble her. The details of the case—that Altman approached Johansson with a request to license her voice, that she declined, that he persisted using a Johansson-like voice anyway—have fanned Hollywood’s worst fears about arrogant tech bros using AI to rip off creators.

In China, the week’s big AI story is that the nation’s internet regulator is rolling out a chatbot of its own, this one based on the thoughts of President Xi Jinping. The Financial Times reports that a research center reporting to the powerful Cyberspace Administration of China is developing a large language model trained on the Chinese leaders’ political philosophy, known as “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” The Wall Street Journal says the chatbot will also be trained on six professional databases about technology.

It’s unclear whether the CAC’s chatbot—which both papers have dubbed “Chat Xi PT”—is meant to be used, or even whether it will be released to the public. But it’s not difficult to imagine how such a model might be employed as a tool for enforcing ideological orthodoxy.

Neither of these approaches to governing AI seems sustainable to me. At some point, U.S. voters are going to stop swallowing AI developers’ claims that the only way the U.S. can hope to compete with China, save democracy, and preserve the American way of life is to let giant tech companies use AI in whatever way they want. And surely Chinese officials eventually will figure out that too much state control over AI will slow the pace of innovation and leave China less secure not more. Or will they? For now, the technology keeps getting smarter faster than the people creating and using it.

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Clay Chandler
clay.chandler@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com