China announced new regulations for generative A.I.—the technology that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbots—on Thursday. The rules will govern every publicly available chatbot and will be overseen by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s top internet regulator. Exempt from the regulations are generative A.I. research and technologies developed for use in other countries.
Major Chinese tech companies, such as Alibaba and Baidu, among others, have not yet released their generative A.I. tools for public use. Experts believe they were waiting for the government to release their final regulations before doing so. (Although Thursday’s policies are titled “Interim Measures,” leaving open the possibility of upcoming changes.) Chinese versions of generative A.I. chatbots and image generators are still either in development or being trialed by B2B customers, CNN reports. Alibaba, for example, released a text-to-image generator called Tongyi Wanxiang last week that's still only available for beta testing to corporate clients. And Baidu, China’s search engine giant, released its Ernie chatbot in March to only about 650 enterprise cloud customers.
