A new report exposes how artificial intelligence has become a part of the censorship and surveillance state in communist China, a disturbing reality that under the former Biden administration came perilously close to home.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute issued a report on Dec. 1 titled, “The party’s AI: How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights.” ASPI accuses the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government of using AI as a “precision instrument” to “automate censorship, enhance surveillance and pre‑emptively suppress dissent.” While the report focuses on China, it also raises broader concerns about how governments can misuse emerging technologies to quash free speech, even in the United States, as the Biden administration aggressively attempted to do with its 57 censorship intiatives.
ASPI explained that the Chinese government is not only able to enforce censorship and surveillance within the country, but now it can even, thanks to AI, target vulnerable groups overseas. AI-enabled platforms and apps have an international reach and bolster the government’s domestic use of the new technology for AI censorship and criminal justice.
China has not only applied AI to censoring images and text online but also in recommending criminal sentences and conducting targeted surveillance of ethnic minorities. Censorship across platforms in the country has become heavily dependent on artificial intelligence, according to ASPI.
Unfortunately, the weaponization of AI to control speech is nothing new. The previous U.S. presidential administration had a similar plan for AI. For example, the administration hijacked the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program (Initiative #5) to target and delete alleged “misinformation” and “disinformation” online, particularly favoring ethnic groups.
Additionally, Biden’s “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence” (Initiative #7) paused research related to making AI open source and thus more transparent to censorship. Under that order, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo created the so-called AI Safety Institute, partly to decide on favored speech.
The Biden AI speech codes (Initiative #8) were even more comprehensive. They included the Anti-Semitism Symposium and the State Department’s Partnership for Global Inclusivity on AI, which included numerous technology companies and pledged to fight alleged “hate” online. The Biden White House also introduced a whole-of-society approach to AI censorship.
Furthermore, the COVID-19 censorship contracts (Initiative #19) included a $300,000 Health and Human Services grant to Innov8AI to use AI in real time to flag Americans’ online speech. Finally, the Biden-era Federal Communications Commission demanded that American broadcasters discussing politics disrupt their messages with disclosures about AI usage (Initiative 49). Thus, it is obvious that the communist Chinese government was not the only global power that attempted to co-op AI for censorship purposes.
Notably, as soon as he took office, Donald Trump signed an executive order “eliminating harmful Biden Administration AI policies and enhancing America’s global AI dominance.”
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