China Blocks Open-made ChatGPT For Fear Of Spreading Propaganda

The Chinese government has banned ChatGPT because it can spread US propaganda. (photo: dock. Pixabay)

JAKARTA - The Chinese government blocked OpenAI's ChatGPT for fear that the company from the United States would use this artificial intelligence to spread propaganda. According to Nikkei Asia, technology companies in China are prohibited from offering chatbots to the public, especially to companies engaged in social media applications.

This ban is because ChatGPT can generate replies that should be blocked by the Chinese Communist Party. However, users managed to find a way out using a virtual private network (VPN) and dozens of "mini-programs" released by third-party developers on Tencent's social media WeChat application which claims to be able to offer services from ChatGPT.

The report states that Chinese regulators are asking technology companies Tencent and Ant Group (affiliated from e-commerce giant Alibaba) to limit access to ChatGPT and report to officers prior before releasing their own chatbots.

China is a country that strongly limits internet and media usage, due to control over news, online environment, and social media platforms. ChatGPT joins Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, and several other Google services that are also blocked nationwide.

However, the United States is also trying to ban the TikTok app from China for the same reason as Chinese officials put forward against ChatGPT.

China Daily, state-owned media, posted on Weibo that ChatGPT "could provide assistance to the US government in the spread of disinformation and manipulation of global narratives for its own geopolitical interests."

While the world community may be surprised by the move, people in China's tech industry have told the ban is imminent.

"We understand from the start that ChatGPT cannot enter China due to censorship issues, and China will need its own version of the ChatGPT," a leading tech company executive told Nikkei.

An executive from another Chinese technology company said they had no plans to use ChatGPT, even before the ban was imposed.

"We have been the target of Chinese regulators (in the midst of the technology industry's crackdown in recent years), so even if there is no such ban, we will not take the initiative to add ChatGPT to our platform because the reply is out of control," the person said., quoted by the Daily Mail.

Chinese companies, including Alibaba and NetEase, are planning to launch a ChatGPT clone. Alibaba announced through its cloud division that it is working on an AI-backed chatbot that will be integrated into its cloud computing products.

NetEase said it could add the technology to some of their educational products. However, the emergence of this technology has received rejection in China because it is considered a potential threat to national security and social stability. Even so, technology companies in China have previously anticipated these restrictions.

While the industry in the US is also taking similar steps, JP Morgan, for example, limits the use of ChatGPT among its employees on concerns about data privacy. There was also a statement saying that the platform would be responsible for the outcome of sensitive political questions asked by users.

ChatGPT itself is the work of OpenAI, a startup founded by Twitter billionaire and CEO Elon Musk, based in San Francisco. The model is trained with a machine learning technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and has been launched on November 30, 2022, and managed to attract more than one million users in its first week. The model is trained with 570 GB of data from books, web text, Wikipedia articles, and other online writings.