China's New AI Image Generator Censors Words Like 'Revolution,' 'Tiananmen Square'

Artificial intelligence image generators are all the rave now. With DALL-E 2 and many other AI-based tools, the future of art remains exciting. Now, the Chinese tech giant Baidu has come up with its own AI called ERNIE-ViLG.

According to MIT Technology Review, ERNIE-ViLG can make better anime art than its Western counterparts. There are other issues with the image generator though. For instance, the AI will not display Tiananmen Square, a key symbol of political activism in China.

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China's censorship trickles down to AI

China is big on censorship. Anything you say on social media may be used against you in the country, especially if you're critical of the top leadership and policies in China. So when the demo of the AI tool arrived in late August, the same censorship plagued the AI software.

For starters, no explicit mentions of political leaders is allowed. Any politically sensitive words were word flagged as "sensitive" and later blocked from generating any result.

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While such censorship is not new to AI, it surely is peculiar. For instance, DALL-E 2 also prohibits some sexual content, faces of public figures, and images of medical treatments.?The Chinese case is peculiar, for this AI functions in the same way as local social media apps, where content is heavily moderated by Chinese authorities to quell dissent at the root.

Even with its censorship problems, the AI itself is very solid. Baidu trained the AI on a data set of 145 million image-text pairs via 10 billion parameters.

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Also read:?Facebook's New AI Bot Thinks Mark Zuckerberg Is A 'Manipulative Bad Person'

As MIT Tech Review pointed out, the biggest difference between ERNIE-ViLG and Western tools is that the former is able to understand prompts written in Chinese without making mistakes.?Just don't try to use names like Xi Jinping, Mao Zedong, or words like revolution in the prompts, for they will be censored.

What do you think about the state of censorship in China? Let us know in the comments below.?For?more in the world of?technology?and?science, keep reading?Indiatimes.com.

References

Yang, Z. (2022, September 15). There’s no Tiananmen Square in the new Chinese image-making AI. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/14/1059481/baidu-chinese-image-ai-tiananmen/