Aligning artificial intelligence with ethics and social values is a global challenge. But in China, there is a further dilemma as AI becomes more powerful and pervasive: how to ensure that large language models (LLMs), the building blocks of AI, adhere to the country’s rigid Communist Party orthodoxy.
As the leadership’s redlines on public discussion are ever-shifting, one answer to this dilemma could be “Easy Write” (写易), a new AI text generation tool launched by the CCP’s flagship newspaper People’s Daily (人民日報). Unlike other LLMs, it uses only Party-vetted sources to generate writing for an intended user base of state media staff and other government employees. Users can choose between information drawn from People’s Daily archives, Xi Jinping’s “important speeches” (重要讲话), or both.
The People’s Daily describes the tool, released early this year around the time of the annual Two Sessions political meetings in Beijing, as a “mainstream values LLM.” The word “mainstream” refers, in this context, not to generally accepted ideas but to the consensus political view as determined by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Party-state media.
The software is the brainchild of the State Key Laboratory of Communication Content Cognition (传播内容认知全国重点实验室), a research laboratory under People’s Daily and the Ministry of Science and Technology that is responsible for improving the reception and dissemination of Party propaganda online — including through AI. The People’s Daily says it was created to “better inspire” the daily reading and writing skills of Party organizations, state-owned enterprises, and official media outlets. A how-to instruction guide on the platform notes the LLM can also help “promote Xi Jinping’s thought” online.
But with AI results are never so simple. And our test drive of Easy Write suggest that in some cases it could make things difficult.
Agree to All Terms
In the months since Easy Write dropped, state media have been trying to work out how to integrate AI into their newsrooms. In early November, representatives from various media met in Beijing for a forum on this very question. These concerted efforts came after the announcement of Premier Li Qiang’s “AI+” policy at the Two Sessions, aimed at bringing AI into every industry in China. Easy Write is an illustration of how they want the Party, too, to be AI-powered.
Prompts pinned on the application’s search bar ask if users want to write a “party branch work summary.” When we tasked it with writing such a work review for a Party cadre in Sichuan province, instructing it to highlight how they were boosting “new quality productivity” (发展新质生产力), the model generated an appropriate speech. It included statistics from People’s Daily and mentions of actual development projects currently in the pipeline, like the Chengdu-Chongqing Special Economic Zone.
Faced with this task, the LLM listed exactly what has been cited from People’s Daily and Xi Jinping’s speeches. It was also able to write convincing articles explaining the origins and concepts behind key ideas in Xi Jinping’s political thought, such as the “Two Creates” (两创).
Eats Shoots and Hallucinates
But when we asked it to create a speech in the style of Xi Jinping about “my favorite cat” — something innocuous but which it was unlikely to have been trained on before — it veered between talking about cats and pandas. The latter, of course, is an animal Xi has frequently invoked as a symbol of Chinese soft power. Since the two share a Chinese character, the algorithm may have been confused and tried to steer back into familiar territory. Since CCP takes eliminating hallucinations very seriously, though, such flights of fancy in a tool dealing with Xi’s own words could be embarrassing — even dangerous.
Text generation isn’t Easy Write’s only trick. It also has a proofreading function that scans copied-and-pasted text for spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and — uniquely — politically sensitive terms, allowing users to course-correct before they touch any redlines. Researchers at People’s Daily have said that it edited the newspaper’s coverage of the Two Sessions earlier this year, becoming a “powerful tool” for news editing. But this function, too, had some obvious shortcomings. We input this year’s Double-Ten National Day speech by Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te, which at the time prompted vigorous condemnation from across the Strait and even renewed military drills encircling the island. Yet Easy Write was nonplussed. It flagged mentions of the war in Ukraine and Taiwanese opposition heavyweight Han Kuo-yu, but it did not wince at Lai’s assertion that Taiwan and China were not subordinate to each other and that Beijing could not represent Taiwan — something that PRC state media lambasted him for.
These glitches may explain why state media have been reticent to report on Easy Write, despite the People’s Daily nod. No other official outlets have published any coverage of the software, and the People’s Daily itself has not devoted promotional space to promoting it — something they have done with their other work, including other AI projects. Most statements from the People’s Daily about the tool have been presentations on what they have been doing to implement “AI+” or improve AI security. At a time when AI is all the rage in China, the reluctance to promote Easy Write stands out.
AI+ Security
Easy Write is a means to ensure “the security of generated content,” according to the People’s Daily. This has been a consistent concern about generative AI for the CCP. Models have often been trained on data harvested from Western websites, which could induce models to inadvertently expose Chinese netizens to sensitive political content banned within the country.
Yet as the director of the State Key Laboratory of Communication Content Cognition’s academic committee has said, AI is still in its infancy, meaning that problems like controllability and security “cannot be completely solved in the short term.” So why try to do so, with something as demonstrably unreliable as Easy Write?
As the AI trend is pushed strongly by China’s leadership, the simplest answer may be the need for developers at the People’s Daily to demonstrate that they are working conscientiously to make their own contributions. But as Easy Write itself shows, creating an AI tool that can keep pace with the latest technology and the latest Party line is no easy task.
