Chinese language regulators doubtless discovered from the EU AI Act, says Jeffrey Ding, an assistant professor of Political Science at George Washington College. “Chinese language policymakers and students have stated that they’ve drawn on the EU’s Acts as inspiration for issues up to now.”
However on the similar time, a few of the measures taken by the Chinese language regulators aren’t actually replicable in different nations. For instance, the Chinese language authorities is asking social platforms to display the user-uploaded content material for AI. “That appears one thing that may be very new and is likely to be distinctive to the China context,” Ding says. “This may by no means exist within the US context, as a result of the US is known for saying that the platform shouldn’t be chargeable for content material.”
However What About Freedom of Expression On-line?
The draft regulation on AI content material labeling is in search of public suggestions till October 14, and it might take one other a number of months for it to be modified and handed. However there’s little cause for Chinese language corporations to delay making ready for when it goes into impact.
Sima Huapeng, founder and CEO of the Chinese language AIGC firm Silicon Intelligence, which makes use of deepfake applied sciences to generate AI brokers, influencers, and replicate residing and useless individuals, says his product now permits customers to voluntarily select whether or not to mark the generated product as AI. But when the regulation passes, he may need to vary it to obligatory.
“If a function is elective, then probably corporations gained’t add it to their merchandise. But when it turns into obligatory by regulation, then everybody has to implement it,” Sima says. It isn’t technically troublesome so as to add watermarks or metadata labels, however it’ll enhance the working prices for compliant corporations.
Insurance policies like this will steer AI away from getting used for scamming or privateness invasion, he says, nevertheless it might additionally set off the expansion of an AI service black market the place corporations attempt to dodge authorized compliance and save on prices.
There’s additionally a high quality line between holding AI content material producers accountable and policing particular person speech by extra subtle tracing.
“The massive underlying human rights problem is to ensure that these approaches do not additional compromise privateness or free expression,” says Gregory. Whereas the implicit labels and watermarks can be utilized to establish sources of misinformation and inappropriate content material, the identical instruments can allow the platforms and authorities to have stronger management over what customers put up on the web. In actual fact, issues about how AI instruments can go rogue has been one of many predominant drivers of China’s proactive AI laws efforts.
On the similar time, the Chinese language AI trade is pushing again on the federal government to have more room to experiment and develop since they’re already behind their Western friends. An earlier Chinese language generative-AI regulation was watered down significantly between the primary public draft and the ultimate invoice, eradicating necessities on identification verification and decreasing penalties imposed on corporations.
“What we have seen is the Chinese language authorities actually attempting to stroll this high quality tightrope between ‘ensuring we keep content material management’ but in addition ‘letting these AI labs in a strategic area have the liberty to innovate,’” says Ding. “That is one other try to do this.”
