When Ernie Bot was released on March 16, the response was a mixture of pleasure and disappointment. Many individuals deemed its performance mediocre relative to the previously released ChatGPT. 

But most individuals simply weren’t capable of see it for themselves. The launch event didn’t feature a live demonstration, and later, to truly check out the bot, Chinese users have to have a Baidu account and apply for a use license that might take so long as three months to return through. For this reason, some individuals who got access early were selling secondhand Baidu accounts on e-commerce sites, charging anywhere from a couple of bucks to over $100. 

Greater than a dozen Chinese generative AI chatbots were released after Ernie Bot. They’re all pretty just like their Western counterparts in that they’re able to conversing in text—answering questions, solving math problems (somewhat), writing programming code, and composing poems. A few of them also allow input and output in other forms, like audio, images, data visualization, or radio signals.

Like Ernie Bot, these services got here with restrictions for user access, making it difficult for most of the people in China to experience them. Some were allowed just for business uses.

One among the primary reasons Chinese tech corporations limited access to most of the people was concern that the models might be used to generate politically sensitive information. While the Chinese government has shown it’s extremely able to censoring social media content, recent technologies like generative AI could push the censorship machine to unknown and unpredictable levels. Most current chatbots like those from Baidu and ByteDance have built-in moderation mechanisms that might refuse to reply sensitive questions on Taiwan or Chinese president Xi Jinping, but a general release to China’s 1.4 billion people would almost actually allow users to seek out more clever ways to bypass censors.