Chinese Censorship Is Leaking Into Answers From American AI

Ask a chatbot in China about Chinese politics, and it will either clam up or echo the official Communist Party line. New studies show a surprising twist: American artificial-intelligence models are unwittingly doing the same—and researchers say AI companies haven’t done much to fix it. The unexpected censorship comes in part from how AI models are trained. They act as a giant blender, gobbling up mountains of data across the web, including state-controlled media. That leaves the resulting smoothie with a taste of authoritarian propaganda. “It’s some of the unintended side effects of the training,” said Nicolas Suzor, an Australian law professor and member of Meta Platforms’ independent oversight board. He and other researchers say AI companies can help address the issue with simple tweaks, including greater transparency about where information comes from. American AI companies say they take steps to ensure neutral responses that protect free speech. Still, the oversight board recently published research that found models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta were significantly less likely to criticize repressive governments than governments in freer countries.