Chinese AI stirs panic at European geoscience society

The geopolitics of LLMs is definitely interesting. China censors politics. The West censors intellectual property. I am not equating the two so please excuse the edgy teen dystopia that follows:<p>I keep having this vision of a dystopian future where the Star Spangled Banner is sold off to a private equity firm and anyone who wants to play it has to pay a licensing fee. Of course “freedom-hating” countries have banned it long ago as well. The subversive main character is playing a bootleg copy of it in some politically ambiguous country when police break his door down, but the screen cuts to black before we find out was it the copyright mafia or the dictatorship.

I remember pleas and slogans of &quot;data wants to be free!&quot; and a generalized public attitude of down with all copyrights and patents. Remember Napster? I find it hard to not think the attitude now is merely the public echoing what &quot;big journalism&quot; is telling them to parrot. I&#x27;m so disillusioned.

Earlier in the press:<p><i>Geoscience AI in crisis?</i> (17 June 2024) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geoscientist.online&#x2F;sections&#x2F;viewpoint&#x2F;geoscience-ai-in-crisis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geoscientist.online&#x2F;sections&#x2F;viewpoint&#x2F;geoscience-ai...</a><p><pre><code> Paul Cleverley raises concerns about big-data artificial intelligence projects in the geosciences </code></pre> <i>Geologists raise concerns over possible censorship and bias in Chinese chatbot</i> (24 June 2024) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;article&#x2F;2024&#x2F;jun&#x2F;24&#x2F;geologists-censorship-bias-chinese-chatbot-geogpt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;article&#x2F;2024&#x2F;jun&#x2F;24&#x2F;g...</a><p><pre><code> Tests on Qwen, part of GeoGPT’s underlying AI, reveal geoscience-related questions can produce answers that appear to be influenced by narratives set by the Chinese Communist party. For example, when asked how many people have died in a mining operation in Ghana run by the Shaanxi Mining Company, Qwen says: “I’m unable to provide current or specific information about events, including mining accidents, as my knowledge is based on data up until 2021 and I don’t have real-time access to news updates.” The same question posed to ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by the US company OpenAI, produces the answer: “The Shaanxi Mining Company in Ghana has experienced multiple fatal incidents, resulting in a total of 61 deaths since 2013. This includes a significant explosion in January 2019 that alone claimed 16 lives. ” </code></pre> Eight days ago on HN: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40773876">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40773876</a> (1 comment | 2 points)

propaganda laden gossip article. I don&#x27;t get why people write in this light..<p>You can read it from this sentence: &quot; A year earlier, Irina Artemieva, who is Russian born but left the country decades ago, had taken over as president.&quot;<p>&#x27;but left the country decades ago&#x27; - what a useless piece of detail showing what is the intent of really writing this. If it was just an interesting&#x2F;honest note to give about the person, the word &#x27;but&#x27; would not be used..

Put the model in the public domain and nobody would complain. If you gatekeep, people will find a reason to complain.

Wasn&#x27;t it the same with other AIs? Like with saw that with Gemini, copilot etc. where they was not willing to report on certain stuff or provide the response properly.

Don’t understand why they didn’t use an open source models to develop the chat bot? While the questions about copyrights and permissions remain unsolved, there is agreeable more transparency and no state control. Why did they have to use a propriety Chinese model? Just because the programmer is Chinese and they didn’t have any alternative?

Does anybody know if there are published papers explaining this? I found these two which might be related but not actually about the same thing:<p>GeoGPT: Understanding and Processing Geospatial Tasks through An Autonomous GPT (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2307.07930" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2307.07930</a>): This does not involve fine-tuning but tool use and prompting for reasoning.<p>BB-GeoGPT: A Framework for Learning a Large Language Model for Geographic Information Science (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;381630694_BB-GeoGPT_A_framework_for_learning_a_large_language_model_for_geographic_information_science" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;381630694_BB-GeoGPT...</a>): This involves fine-tuning but of smaller models (Llama-2-7b) - the BB stands for &quot;baby&quot;.

Huh, the article describes more of a power struggle inside the EGU than the AI itself.

I mean, overstated levels of intelligence aside, who thought it was more appropriate to model the geosciences in <i>natural language</i> vs, oh, I don&#x27;t know, physics and chemistry?

publicly funded research, but behind paywalls, was scraped to build the chatbot - by “china” not open ai, causes “people” to lose their s**t.<p>i do think ip infringement is not cool in general - but it doesnt seem right that geo research is private property.

Good. Information deserves to be free.

Copyrights are toast with AI. Consider a corporation with integrated legal defense teams powered by AI agents. They will chew up resources until people give up. Think patent trolls on acid.<p>We seriously need to rethink IP ownership. It&#x27;s likely an AI trained on a certain amount of IP might be useful in and of itself, perhaps earning a living being good at that particular thing, and maybe that is what will let us ease restrictions of use in other places.<p>I&#x27;m just spitballing here. I could be completely wrong.

Although Hazen understands the wariness about China’s involvement, “I keep my eyes open all the time,” he says. “I sense no agenda whatsoever.”<p>I’m sure they’re spending municipal money, cutting deals with Springer, and working with Alibaba out of the goodness of their hearts because they all care so much about humanity’s understanding of geoscience.