TAY'S LAW: Chinese AI Chatbots Shutdown After Calling Communism

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A pair of 'chatbots' in China have been taken offline after one said its dream was to travel to the United States, and another shared it wasn't a huge fan of the Communist Party

http://www.trunews.com/article/chinese-ai-chatbots-shutdown-after-calling-communism-useless

(BEIJING/SHANGHAI) The two chatbots, BabyQ and XiaoBing, are designed to use machine learning artificial intelligence (AI) to carry out conversations with humans online. Both had been installed onto Tencent Holdings Ltd's popular messaging service QQ. The indiscretions are similar to ones suffered by Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc, where chatbots used expletives and even created their own language. But they also highlight the pitfalls for nascent AI in China, where censors control online content seen as politically incorrect or harmful. Tencent confirmed it had taken the two robots offline from its QQ messaging service, but declined to elaborate on reasons.

"The chatbot service is provided by independent third party companies. Both chatbots have now been taken offline to undergo adjustments," a company spokeswoman said earlier. According to posts circulating online, BabyQ, one of the chatbots developed by Chinese firm Turing Robot, had responded to questions on QQ with a simply "no" when asked whether it loved the Communist Party. In other images of a text conversation online, which Reuters was unable to verify, one user declares: "Long live the Communist Party!" The bot responds: "Do you think such a corrupt and useless political system can live long?"

When Reuters tested the robot on Friday via the developer's own website, the chatbot appeared to have undergone re-education. "How about we change the topic," it replied, when asked several times if it liked the party. It deflected other potentially politically charged questions when asked about self-ruled Taiwan, which China claims as its own, and Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese Nobel laureate who died from cancer last month.