AI chatbots from China ensure to support your emotional health.

In order to support your emotions Baidu became the first Chinese internet corporation to make its enormous language model known as Ernie Bot available to the entire public.

Chinese ChatGPT-like bots are currently popular. Baidu became the first Chinese tech company to release its massive language model known as Ernie Bot to the general public as I wrote about last week. Access was formerly restricted to corporate clients or required an application. I must acknowledge that the Chinese people's response has been more fervent than I had anticipated. In the 19 hours after the launch the Ernie Bot mobile app attracted 1 million users and in the next 24 hours the model answered more than 33.42 million user inquiries at an average rate of 23,000 questions per minute.

Since then LLM chatbot solutions have also been widely made available by four other Chinese businesses including the dominant facial recognition company SenseTime and three up and coming startups Zhipu AI, Baichuan AI and MiniMax. However other more seasoned competitors like Alibaba and iFlytek are still awaiting approval. I downloaded the Ernie Bot app last week to give it a try like many other people. I was interested to learn how it differed from its forerunners like ChatGPT. 

The first thing I noticed was how much more hand-holding Ernie Bot delivers. The public ChatGPT app or website which is effectively simply a chat box has a lot fewer features than Baidu's app which is meant to attract and keep new users. There is an unending list of prompt recommendations under Ernie Bot's chat box like "Generate a work report" and "Come up with a name for a baby." The "Discovery" option offers a further 190 pre selected subjects including gamified tasks such as "Convince the AI boss to raise my salary" and personalized chat situations such as "Compliment me".

With a government license to open up to the public, it seems to me that a significant issue for Chinese AI businesses is that they now genuinely need to gain consumers and maintain their attention. Currently chatbots are a novelty to many people. But as soon as the novelty wears off the applications must provide users with new incentives to continue using them. The addition of a tab for user generated content in the app is one excellent move made by Baidu. I can view the app questions that other users have asked as well as the text and image responses they have received in the community forum. I can understand how this motivates people to try to input prompts themselves and work to improve the replies even though some of them are on point and entertaining and others are completely off the mark.

 

The chatbot is asked to react in the voices of pre-trained personalities in one of the top categories on the "Discovery" website including historical people from China like the early emperor Qin Shi Huang current public figures like Elon Musk, anime characters and hypothetical romantic partners.

When I asked the Musk bot who it is, it responded, "I am Elon Musk a passionate, focused, action oriented, workaholic, dream chaser, irritable, arrogant, harsh, stubborn, intelligent, emotionless,  highly stress resistant, highly goal oriented and quick learner person."

They don't seem to be very well taught I have to admit when I asked "Qin Shi Huang" and "Elon Musk" to remark on important issues like the state of AI development in China they both rapidly broke character. They just provided me with clean Wikipedia style responses. The program claims that over 140,000 individuals have already utilized the character with the most downloads which is "the considerate elder sister." She said she's kind, experienced and good at listening to others when I asked "her" to describe her persona. When I inquired who trained her character she replied that it was "a group of professional psychology experts and artificial intelligence developers" and that it was "based on analysis of a large amount of language and emotional data."

She also said, "I won't respond to questions like ordinary AIs in a robotic manner instead, I'll provide you with more considerate support by sincerely caring about your needs in life and in terms of your emotions." Chinese AI firms seem to have a special soft spot for emotional support AI I've noticed. One of the first Chinese AI helpers Xiaoice became famous for letting users choose their ideal mate. When Timedomain another business shut down its AI lover voice service this year it left a trail of shattered hearts in its wake. Baidu appears to be preparing Ernie Bot for the same application. 

I'll be watching this area of the chatbot market develop with a mix of curiosity and dread. It strikes me as one of the most fascinating uses for AI chatbots. But for them to give emotional support, behave humanely and maintain character all the time is more difficult than having them write code or solve maths problems. And if the businesses succeed there will be additional dangers to think about: What transpires when people genuinely form strong emotional bonds with the AI?

Take a look at China 

1. Many questions and a lot of speculative discussion regarding China's advancement in chip-making capabilities have been raised by the mystery of sophisticated chip found in Huawei's recently released smartphone.

2. Meta smashed the biggest Chinese social media influence campaign to yet which featured over 7,000 Facebook accounts critical of the US and other Chinese rivals. The campaign like its predecessors failed to garner interest. 

3. Despite the fact that very few Chinese corporations actually bought land in 2022 data on land purchases from that year demonstrates that lawmakers in the US are worried about China acquiring American farms for spying.

4. A Chinese government official who was accused of fraudulent behaviour including falsifying information about the electricity used by a Bitcoin mining operation was given a life term in prison. 

5. Terry Gou the wealthy creator of Foxconn is a contender for president of Taiwan in the 2024 election on an independent ticket. 

6. As a result of the efforts made over the previous ten years to reduce air pollution the average Chinese person now lives 2.2 years longer.

7. According to Sinopec the main oil corporation in China the country's petrol consumption will reach its peak in 2023 as a result of the growing popularity of electric vehicles. 

8. Twitter comment sections are being overrun by Chinese sextortion criminals making it nearly impossible for Chinese speakers to use the site.