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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Just to give an update on a comment I made a little while ago about China and AI art: I might have been wrong, because it turns out that a Chinese social media site opened up an AI-powered repainting tool back in November. The idea is simple: you give it a picture, it anime-ifies it.

My assumption was that China, which had been doing some crackdowns on "soft" tech like social media a while ago, would not allow the common citizen to wield such generative power, not when there's the small possibility of someone making something unflattering to the Party or Xi. I assumed, for this reason, that China would not catch up to and surpass the US in AI research even if OpenAI and Stable.ai censor their AIs to avoid invoking the wrath of powerful progressives (though see also...), because the CCP would not take any risk with technology that was originally intended to be democratized. But "Different Dimension Me" looks to possibly be using Stable Diffusion or perhaps something like NovelAI, so we'll see if China feels as if it can master AI without it bringing them down.

would not allow the common citizen to wield such generative power

How would that work out? It's possible chinese censors might object to anime diffusion models, but is it obvious they would? And there are already many GPUs in china, are they gonna ban them, or ML as a whole?

not when there's the small possibility of someone making something unflattering to the Party or Xi.

Photo editing tools present the exact same risk, yet aren't banned in china. This doesn't really make sense. Chinese censorship isn't just "xi bad = BAN!!!", and scattered news articles about particularly exciting censorship incidents without any other context are not a useful way to understand how that happens.