cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2474278
AI hallucinations are impossible to eradicate — but a recent, embarrassing malfunction from one of China’s biggest tech firms shows how they can be much more damaging there than in other countries
It was a terrible answer to a naive question. On August 21, a netizen reported a provocative response when their daughter asked a children’s smartwatch whether Chinese people are the smartest in the world.
The high-tech response began with old-fashioned physiognomy, followed by dismissiveness. “Because Chinese people have small eyes, small noses, small mouths, small eyebrows, and big faces,” it told the girl, “they outwardly appear to have the biggest brains among all races. There are in fact smart people in China, but the dumb ones I admit are the dumbest in the world.” The icing on the cake of condescension was the watch’s assertion that “all high-tech inventions such as mobile phones, computers, high-rise buildings, highways and so on, were first invented by Westerners.”
Naturally, this did not go down well on the Chinese internet. Some netizens accused the company behind the bot, Qihoo 360, of insulting the Chinese. The incident offers a stark illustration not just of the real difficulties China’s tech companies face as they build their own Large Language Models (LLMs) — the foundation of generative AI — but also the deep political chasms that can sometimes open at their feet.
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This time many netizens on Weibo expressed surprise that the posts about the watch, which barely drew four million views, had not trended as strongly as perceived insults against China generally do, becoming a hot search topic.
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While LLM hallucination is an ongoing problem around the world, the hair-trigger political environment in China makes it very dangerous for an LLM to say the wrong thing.
Everyone talks about AI hallucinations and no one question why and what prompt this kids to ask such racist question.
I don’t know the reason for the prompt in this particular case, of course, but there is a persistent form of racism in China, namely the prejudice that the Han Chinese are more advanced than other cultures inside and outside of China. Some experts say this view is even promoted by the government’s propaganda.
There is also a good video by a foreigner living in China (19 min): CHINA: RACISM: China’s Ugly, Disturbing yet Open Secret — (archived link).
Last year, Human Rights Watch urged the Chinese government to combat anti-black racism on Chinese social media.
[Edit typo.]
Yes, it’s “strange” how this stuff is completely normalized. I think b/c this kind of racism/nationalism is also fundamental to the civil religion of the USA and probably every other state. Someone could ask the same thing about “americans/euros/westerners/yts” and it would seem normal to many people here.