Chinese authorities are reportedly clamping down on the use of ChatGPT in the country, amid growing concern that the AI-powered chatbot will spread uncensored information to the public.
Nikkei reported citing sources, that regulators have told major Chinese tech companies, including Tencent Holdings and Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, not to offer ChatGPT services to the public either directly or via third parties.
The sources added that tech companies will also need to report to regulators before they launch their own ChatGPT-like services.
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ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI, made a swift sweep around the world, racking up more than 100 million users in about two months after launch. Though officially, ChatGPT is not available in China, the South Asian giant has caught the frenzy.
Internet users in China have been accessing the third-party form of the chatbot services from platforms such as Tencent and Alibaba using Virtual Private Network (VPN). Nikkei reported that there have also been dozens of “mini programs” released by third-party developers on Tencent’s WeChat social media app that claim to offer services from ChatGPT.
Chinese companies have joined the race to develop AI-powered chatbots as the public caught the contagious wave of ChatGPT. Alibaba and Baidu said they’re working on their own chatbots that they plan to roll out soon. Baidu said it plans to release its chatbot dubbed ‘ERNIE Bot’ in March, and it will be used across various platforms such as its search engine, voice assistant for smart devices and even its autonomous driving technology.
CNN reported that a team at China’s Fudan University has developed their own version called MOSS, which instantly went viral, crashing the platform as many users attempted to access the tool.
These show how much the Chinese people want to use the AI tool. But regulatory pressure is forcing platforms offering third-party services regardless of whether they are connected to ChatGPT or not to suspend them, according to the people who spoke to Nikkei.
The pressure is being spurred by Chinese state-owned media outlets. Nikkei reported China Daily saying on Monday, in a post on Weibo, China’s heavily censored equivalent of Twitter, that the chatbot “could provide a helping hand to the U.S. government in its spread of disinformation and its manipulation of global narratives for its own geopolitical interests.”
With China’s intolerance of Western internet companies, ChatGPT appears ready to join the growing number of US companies banned in the country. Dozens of prominent US websites and apps have either been banned or heavily censored in China, starting from 2009 and 2010 when Beijing moved to block Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Reddit and Wikipedia were banned in China in 2018 and 2019.
But sources in the tech industry, who spoke to Nikkei, said they are not surprised by such a clampdown.
“Our understanding from the beginning is that ChatGPT can never enter China due to issues with censorship, and China will need its own versions of ChatGPT,” said one executive from a leading tech company.
The report quoted another unnamed executive from another leading Chinese tech firm saying that even without a direct warning, his company would not make use of ChatGPT.
“We have already been a target of the Chinese regulator [amid the tech industry crackdown in recent years], so even if there were no such ban, we would never take the initiative to add ChatGPT to our platforms because its responses are uncontrollable,” the person said. “There will inevitably be some users who ask the chatbot politically sensitive questions, but the platform would be held accountable for the results.”