China is drawing up tighter rules to govern generative artificial intelligence as Beijing seeks to balance encouragement for companies to develop the technology against its desire to control content.
The Cyberspace Administration of China, the powerful internet
watchdog, aims to create a system to force companies to obtain a licence before
they release generative AI models, said two people close to Chinese regulators.
The licensing regime is part of regulations being finalised
as early as this month, according to people with knowledge of the move. It
signals how Beijing is struggling to reconcile an ambition to develop
world-beating technologies with its longstanding censorship regime.
“It is the first time that [authorities in China] find
themselves having to do a trade-off” between two Communist party goals of
sustaining AI leadership and controlling information, said Matt Sheehan, a
fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
One person close to the CAC’s deliberations said: “If
Beijing intends to completely control and censor the information created by AI,
they will require all companies to obtain prior approval from the authorities.”
But “the regulation must avoid stifling domestic companies
in the tech race”, the person added. Authorities “are wavering”, the person
said.
China is seeking to formalise its regulatory approach to
generative AI before the technology — which can quickly create humanlike text,
images and other content in response to simple prompts — becomes widespread.
Draft rules published in April said AI content should
“embody core socialist values” and not contain anything that “subverts state
power, advocates the overthrow of the socialist system, incites splitting the
country or undermines national unity”.
The CAC needed to ensure that AI was “reliable and
controllable”, its director Zhuang Rongwen said recently.
The draft regulations also required that the data used by
companies to train generative AI models should ensure “veracity, accuracy,
objectivity and diversity”.
Companies such as Baidu and Alibaba, which rolled out
generative AI applications this year, had been in contact with regulators over
the past few months to ensure their AI did not breach the rules, said two other
people close to the regulators.
Angela Zhang, associate professor of law at the University
of Hong Kong, said: “China’s regulatory measures primarily centre on content
control.”
Other governments and authorities are racing to legislate
against potential abuses of the technology. The EU has proposed some of the
toughest rules in the world, prompting outcry from the region’s companies and
executives, while Washington has been discussing measures to control AI and the
UK is launching a review.
The quality of the data used to train AI models is a key
area of regulatory scrutiny, with attempts to address issues such as
“hallucinations” in which AI systems fabricate material.
Sheehan said Beijing had set its requirement “so much
higher”, meaning Chinese companies would need to expend more effort to filter
the kind of data used to “train” AI.
The lack of available data to meet those demands has become
a bottleneck preventing some companies from developing and improving so-called
large language models, the technology underlying chatbots such as OpenAI’s
ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
Businesses were likely to be “more cautious and conservative
about what [AI] they build” because the consequences of violating the rules
could be severe, said Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational
research grants at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging
Technology.
Chinese authorities implied in their draft regulations that
tech groups making an AI model would be almost fully responsible for any
content created. That would “make companies less willing to make their models
available since they might be held responsible for problems outside their
control”, said Toner.