China is exporting more than A.I. models. It wants its data to influence the world’s chatbots, raising fears that Beijing’s narratives will spread with the technology.
When ChatGPT was still a new technology, researchers in Beijing tested how well it handled Chinese-language questions. Their response to its results was telling.
The chatbot described the former N.B.A. star Yao Ming as the first Chinese woman to play professional basketball in the United States. It confused two classic works of Chinese literature, “Journey to the West” and “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which were written two centuries apart.
The researchers at the Beijing Institute of Technology, who published their findings in 2023, also wrote that ChatGPT generated a large amount of “biased commentary about China” and “would not evade or refuse to answer political questions about China.”
ChatGPT has since been updated many times; it is unclear how the results would differ now. But the examples pointed to a central concern in China’s quest to become an artificial intelligence power: The systems shaping the future are being trained on data sets that are overwhelmingly in English, and reflect what China sees as a Western way of thinking.
That imbalance is also a strategic vulnerability for the Chinese Communist Party because it means Western views are likely to prevail when it comes to issues like human rights and the status of Taiwan, the self-governed island claimed by Beijing, analysts say.
To fix this gap, and to build more powerful A.I. tools, Beijing wants to become a leading supplier of data — the troves of text, images and videos — that train A.I. systems around the world.
