De-Risking Authoritarian AI: A Balanced Approach to Protecting Our Digital Ecosystems

By Gilding, Simeon

From the document: "It seems like an age since we worried about China's dominion over the world's 5G [fifth generation] networks. These days, the digital authoritarian threat feels decidedly steampunk--Russian missiles powered by washing-machine chips and stately Chinese surveillance balloons. And, meanwhile, our short attention spans are centred (ironically) on TikTok--an algorithmically addictive short video app owned by Chinese technology company ByteDance. More broadly, there are widespread concerns that 'large language model' (LLM) generative AI such as ChatGPT [Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer] will despoil our student youth, replace our jobs and outrun the regulatory capacity of the democracies. [...] This report is broken down into six sections. The first section highlights our dependency on AI-enabled products and services. The second examines China's efforts to export AI-enabled products and services and promote its model of digitally enabled authoritarianism, in competition with the US and the norms and values of democracy. This section also surveys PRC [People's Republic of China] laws compelling tech-sector cooperation and explains the nature of the threat, giving three examples of Chinese AI-enabled products of potential concern. It also explains why India is particularly vulnerable to the threat. In the third section, the report looks at the two key democratic responses to the challenge of AI: on the one hand, US efforts to counter both China's development of advanced AI technologies and the threat from Chinese technology already present in the US digital ecosystem; on the other, a draft EU Regulation to protect the fundamental rights of EU citizens from the pernicious effects of AI. The fourth section of the report proposes a framework for triaging and managing the risk of China's authoritarian AI-enabled products and services embedded in democratic digital ecosystems. The final section acknowledges complementary efforts to mitigate the PRC threat to democracies' digital ecosystems."