As part of its holistic strategy of “unrestricted warfare,” the Chinese Communist Party understands well the potential propaganda value of AI-generated content.
To corner the market on narrative control, the CCP’s Cyberspace Administration of China has mandated that AI should “embody core socialist values” that reflect its collectivist principles.
Via Hong Kong Free Press:
Content produced by generative artificial intelligence services should embody “core socialist values,” China’s cyberspace regulator has said as part of its latest draft measures to regulate AI technology firms.
In a list of proposed regulations unveiled on Tuesday, the Cyberspace Administration of China said the country supported the independent innovation of artificial intelligence. But developers of generative AI products must comply with the proposed legal requirements and “respect social morality and public order.
The Administration’s stated aim is to ban “violent, obscene, pornographic, and false information.”
Continuing:
AI-generated content should not contain messages that would overturn the socialist system, incite separatism, undermine national unity or promote terrorism and extremism, the authorities said. Messages that spread ethnic hatred and discrimination, or contain violent, obscene, pornographic and false information would also be prohibited.
Of course, what’s good for the goose apparently isn’t good for the gander in the CCP’s estimation. While it’s busy protecting its domestic population from undue influences that might undermine its grip on power and Chinese cultural integrity in general, it’s hard at work promoting transgender terrorism to American children and promulgating racist BLM-style agitprop across its TikTok platform.
It’s time that, when discussing issues related to China’s geopolitical long game, we reframe its TikTok transgender propaganda as well as all aspects of its propaganda campaigns as information warfare.
This is how Chinese authorities themselves frame the issue, via the Institute of World Politics:
The doctrine of total war outlined in Unrestricted Warfare clearly demonstrates that the People’s Republic of China is preparing to confront the United States and our allies by conducting “asymmetrical” or multidimensional attacks on almost every aspect of our social, economic and political life.
What China lacks in comparative kinetic capabilities vis-à-vis the United States, it attempts to make up for by unrestricted warfare, which includes not just building economic inroads into former U.S. strongholds across Africa, Latin America, and Asia but also infiltrating the public discourse and perverting it to create internal conflict.
They understand, as history teaches, that all great empires collapse from within, not from without. As evidenced by the example of the Roman Empire, they tend to become culturally stale and decadent while they overextend themselves economically simultaneously until the internal contradictions become too heavy to bear.
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