China’s internet censors announce crackdown on AI videos and ‘pessimism’

China’s government agency overseeing internet censorship has announced a new crackdown on a range of content it deems objectionable, including a focus on videos generated by artificial intelligence and anyone promoting “pessimism”, according to a new report from Hong Kong. South China Morning Post.

China’s Cyberspace Administration first announced an annual target list for Internet censorship in 2020 using the name Qing Lang, which means “clear and bright,” according to the SCMP. And this year’s list includes goals that are expected and perhaps unexpected for anyone living outside of China.

The new focus of censorship will target anyone who “promotes pessimism and extremism”, who has “wrong career values” or what is seen as the “worship of money”, among many other offences. As SCMP notes“pessimism” is a completely new addition that hasn’t appeared in previous lists.

The censor body will also focus on the Chinese version of TikTok, called Douyin, for special scrutiny as the whole world sees the rise of new tools that allow anyone to easily create persuasive and lively videos with just a few lines of prompting. What is popularly called “generative artificial intelligence” can allow people to receive text, images or videos in seconds that can be difficult to distinguish from content created by the average person with a smartphone.

While it might seem like China’s censorship rules should be clear, given the work the government does to articulate them every year with Qing Lang, they can be anything but obvious. As just one recent example, there was a crackdown after the death of former Premier Li Keqiang because the government apparently believed that the former Chinese official’s “excessive praise” was actually veiled criticism of China’s current leader Xi Jinping.

China’s cyber watchdog has also deleted videos of angry homebuyers who feel cheated by property developers over the past two years, as Reuters and Bloomberg both were noted in stories last year. One of China’s top economists, Hong Hao, has also been censored for predicting that China’s property market could take a decade to recover from current problems.

The Cyberspace Administration shut down more than 4,000 websites and removed 55 apps in the second quarter of this year alone, according to a report earlier this year by the SCMP.