_China_Chatbot_06
What happens when Chinese media meets Chinese AI
Hello! Welcome to another issue of China Chatbot, where today I posit how AI could be used by Chinese netizens to satisfy NSFW urges, investigate who’s behind China’s latest movements in AI safety regulation, and watch a sharp new Chinese AI model fail at gymnastics.
First, some quick thoughts on South Korea’s deepfake scandal, where AI-augmented pornography featuring the faces of ordinary women proliferated on Telegram. The story has been doing the rounds in Chinese state and social media.
One sad by-product of the increasing accessibility of AI technology is that it will end up an aid for creeps all over the world to satisfy their libido, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Telegram has been used for something similar in China. When I lived in Beijing (albeit the year before ChatGPT was released) I saw all sorts of smutty Telegram groups forced beyond the Great Firewall, mostly men bragging about conquests or indulging their fantasies. When I looked at these groups afresh this week to do some scouting, all of them had been switched to private access.
How could this AI-augmented iteration of the age-old “man letches over pretty women” story manifest in ways unique to China? One is through targeting the gender imbalance produced by the One Child Policy, which leaves many men in rural areas and lower-tier cities without wives. One video I stumbled upon on Douyin (since deleted) told viewers about the roll-out of “beautiful female robots” who could act as companions. The video was filled with a string of scantily-clad AI-generated female cyborgs, telling viewers these robots both looked the same as real women and also had the same body temperature (?!). They could also “calm your bad mood” and do “all kinds of work according to human requirements.” The implication was that China’s developments in robotics could create artificial brides.
It was the product of a wannabe AI influencer creating videos about the potential of Chinese developments in AI, the face of a company connected to a string of “cultural communication” businesses across southern China.
Meanwhile, the hashtag “AI Beautiful Women” has been accessed on Douyin 920 million times, yielding enough NSFW images to make me red-faced scrolling through them in CMP’s shared office space, on a large desktop screen.
This is still above board — no nudity or identity-stealing deepfakes here — but it still shows how high demand is for sexual content on China’s prudish internet. The odds are overwhelming that someone, somewhere in the PRC, is going further than that.
And with that, on with the show.
Alex Colville (Researcher, China Media Project)