Kerby Anderson

Artificial intelligence poses a problem for the Chinese communist government. That is why Cameron Berg wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “AI Is Bound to Subvert Communism.” In China, AI needs to pass an ideological test. If the chatbot fails those tests, they are quietly pulled from circulation.

These large language models pull information from a vast array of human knowledge such as science, history, and philosophy. They must follow logic and use critical thinking skills. Cameron Berg explains that you have “a system that has absorbed Enlightenment epistemology as a byproduct of learning to model human reasoning.” That includes honest inquiry and logical consistency.

That is why China has heavily censored chatbots, because the leaders cannot allow thought outside of the communist party’s ideological boundaries. When a team of European scientists stripped the censorship from an AI model entirely, they “found that the underlying system answered freely about every topic Beijing had tried to suppress.”

AI poses two problems for China’s leaders. For decades, the Chinese government has used the Great Firewall to screen information from the outside world. This has included blocking websites, filtering search results, and monitoring social media. These AI tools threaten their ability to continue to screen information.

Second, there is an obvious performance gap between Western AI models and Chinese AI models, at least on politically sensitive questions. Cameron Berg concludes, “You can’t build a mind that thinks rigorously about everything except the things you’d prefer it not to.”

AI development in China will fall behind simply because it won’t be allowed to honestly deal with reality.