China bets on the face of cheap AI to hook the world

Artificial intelligence is at a very Chinese time in its life. Moves in China are throwing the dominance of American “frontier labs” such as Google and OpenAI into question.

Last week ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, released an AI video-generating tool called Seedance 2.0 which produces high-quality film-like clips from text prompts, with a casual disregard for copyright concerns.

This week Anthropic, the US company behind the chatbot Claude, said three Chinese AI labs created thousands of fake accounts. They were used to harvest Claude’s answers in a practice called “distillation” which can be used to improve AI models.

These events have led to suggestions that Beijing may be gaining the upper hand in the battle to dominate AI. So, is it winning the “AI race” against Washington?

While most advanced frontier models are still made by American companies, the world’s second-largest economy is pushing hard to develop cheap, widely used artificial intelligence tools, which could create global dependence on Chinese platforms.

Cyber superpower

Reuters news agency reports the industry is bracing for a “flurry” of low-cost Chinese AI models, driving usage costs down. So, what is the plan? Official policy suggest it sees AI as “a new engine for building China into a manufacturing and cyber superpower.”

Since 2017, Beijing has recognised that the technology is at the centre of “international competition” across the world.

“By 2030,” one key policy document said, AI “technology and application should achieve world-leading levels, making China the primary AI innovation center.”

This focus on becoming the dominant player in artificial intelligence helps explain why the countries tech companies are pushing hard on price. If you can make your product cheap enough, you might just make it globally ubiquitous.

Cost helps determine who adopts AI first, and which models are implemented in software and services. Even if the United States remains ahead on most elite benchmarks, Chinese products could still become globally influential if they are widely used.

But China does not present its AI technology to the world as only benefiting itself. Instead, it is pitched as a contribution to humanity.

A 2019 statement of “governance principles” from a national artificial intelligence governance expert committee argues that development should enhance “the common well-being of humanity” and “serve the progress of human civilization.”

These phrases portray AI as a technology that advances the human story itself, rather than only serving Chinese interests. It suggests its AI leadership is good for everyone. This is an example of the country’s soft power.

Tools such as Seedance may threaten Hollywood’s business model, but they do something else too. High-quality, low-cost generative media can spread quickly. If Chinese systems become widespread, they can influence creators, developer habits, and platform dependencies.

Security concerns

This might play well in non-Western markets that need affordable tools and may dislike American tech dominance.

For liberal democracies such as the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, the growth of Chinese AI tools creates a headache. It will not be easy to manage security concerns while avoiding technological isolation if Chinese AI tools become widely adopted.

There is a darker side to Chinese systems. US think-tank Freedom House describes the country as having the world’s “worst conditions for internet freedom.”

It suggests other nations are now “embracing the ‘Chinese model’ of extensive censorship and automated surveillance.”

In 2022, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued rules for the algorithms that curate news feeds and short video platforms. Providers are required to “uphold mainstream value orientations” and “vigorously disseminate positive energy.”

These algorithms are important because they shape what people see and what is suppressed. As a result, these rules suggest the Beijing is deeply concerned with controlling information across its social media platforms and AI tools.

Not every Chinese AI tool is a propaganda weapon. Rather, China is building world-class AI technology within an authoritarian system that prioritises the control of information.

This means its ability to make generative AI commercially powerful will likely also make censorship and narrative management cheaper and easier.

China’s business and soft-power model is a much bigger story than just Seedance’s cavalier attitude towards copyright or Anthropic’s concerns about intellectual property.

Authoritarian model

China’s goal is to build AI tools that rival those created by America’s tech giants, and to make them inexpensive and adopted globally. For other countries, this may create a dilemma.

Once a technology becomes a standard, it can be difficult to justify using a different product. The question that remains is whether liberal democracies can adopt China’s low-cost products without drifting into dependence on systems shaped by an authoritarian political model.

Nicholas Morieson is a Research Fellow for the Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of China Factor.