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- cross-posted to:
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The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) national internet censor just announced that all AI-generated content will be required to have labels that are explicitly seen or heard by its audience and embedded in metadata. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) just released the transcript for the media questions and answers (akin to an FAQ) on its Measures for the Identification of Artificial Intelligence Generated and Synthetic Content [machine translated]. We saw the first signs of this policy move last September when the CAC’s draft plans emerged.
This regulation takes effect on September 1, 2025, and will compel all service providers (i.e., AI LLMs) to “add explicit labels to generated and synthesized content.” The directive includes all types of data: text, images, videos, audio, and even virtual scenes. Aside from that, it also orders app stores to verify whether the apps they host follow the regulations.
Users will still be able to ask for unlabeled AI-generated content for “social concerns and industrial needs.” However, the generating app must reiterate this requirement to the user and also log the information to make it easier to trace. The responsibility of adding the AI-generated label and metadata falls on the shoulders of this end-user person or entity.
Anyone’s praising this doesn’t understand that this request is basically impossible and is merely posturing.
I’m a developer and I work a lot with LLM data and the only way to detect LLM text is through watermarks where some words or expressions are statistically preferred over others. This means it’s only effective on large bodies of text that are not modified further.
If you take LLM content and remix it using traditional natural language processing then it’s done - the content is indistinguishable and untraceable and it takes like 50 lines of python code and a few milliseconds of computing.
I think you’re looking past the real reason why this is happening.
it’s not to improve the quality of information.
it’s to silence anyone with dissenting opinions of the Chinese Government.
it’s easy to label something. some Chinese citizen posts something about the government, tagged as AI, they’re fined, jailed, etc.
100% thats exactly what’s happening and I can’t believe people are so blinded by AI generato hate to praise stuff like that.
A government policy isn’t just posturing because the state now has a rule to cite if they’re gonna issue you a fine or whatever the punishment is supposed to be. So you will either comply, or go underground or abroad. That’s a real consequence.
So it’s just another way for authoritarians to exert power over people then?
The only way to address AI is through low level laws we already have like anti-discrimination, defamation, online bullying etc. But those give people more rights and protections and you can’t have that.
exert power over people to stop them from doing what?
I mean you can just say that about any and every law or policy. No need to be so knee-jerk about it. The point I’m making is it isn’t just posturing. It’s not like a company pretending to promise to watermark their AI outputs; it’s a government saying you must comply with new rule.
I would love to delve into this a little more.
It’s impossible because the text these LLM-based models produce would be obtuse to watermark.
Huh?
What about photos and video and audio?! Why are you asking?
What about photos, videos and audio? You should see what the second L means in the LLM before you go at it
LLMs are only one aspect of this, but yeah, probably the most difficult to discern, at least at the moment.
You should read some of the content you’re commenting on before posting a critique.