this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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They are against it because anything bad that could come of further adoption of AI will happen if it's profitable for the capitalists. Even now NVIDIA is continuing to pump the bubble when everyone knows it's a bubble, because of the profits.
The prospects are entirely different in China, because capitalists are regulated. But nobody who is vehemently against AI is aware of the difference and likely will tell you China is capitalist. So all the problems that arise from capitalist control of AI are ascribed to AI alone as well.
The potential consequences are severely reduced because of this, but up to a point the government will allow capitalists to do the same harmful things they do in the west. They just won't allow them to collapse the whole economy and destroy the lives of half the country. That doesn't necessarily mean that the prospects of LLMs are fundamentally different, just that their potential fallout is much more limited because China is not capitalist.
China objectively treats AI differently than the West. Whether that constitutes a 'fundamental' difference I don't know, I'm not big on that word philosophically, but the fact that Chinese private companies are providing their models open source, and you can use them free of charge (the most you will pay is a very low fee for API usage) shows a huge difference, they don't consider it a product to make a profit on, i.e. A commodity.
AI is also not held solely by the capitalists in China, the government develops on it. Just recently Beijing schools started a pilot program to teach middle and high school students AI through science projects.
What we need to ask is what do they see in it, what this fills for them and helps them with.
the situation is fundamentally different in China https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/the-ghost-in-the-machine
Can you please give any examples of the Chinese government allowing capitalists to do harmful things to the Chinese people?
Commodification of housing is a recent example. They were allowed to do harm, up to a point. When the bubble popped, the state caught it to prevent it from doing massive harm.
This is a strange question to even ask. China has labor exploitation, China has capitalists, China has rent seeking behavior, these are all things that do harm people and the Chinese government acknowledges them. That's what the socialist market economy means, you take the bad with the good.
It might seem like a strange question but people tend to have wildly different pespectives and understanding about China depending on what part of the world they're in, what the media they consume says about it, and whether they've lived there or not. So even if we agreed with each other it'd still be worth going through because we're in a public forum where it's helpful for others to be more illustrative.
"up to a point" is doing massive work here.
China has capitalism: in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and in Macao. When you cross the boundary between Hong Kong and Shenzhen it's like night and day. Shenzhen ain't no backwater either, but the cost of living, quality of life, environment, air pollution (the prevalence of electric cars makes so much difference that despite being less strict about smoking in public, it's still cleaner in SZ), advertising, cleanliness of public facilities, parks in walking distance of everywhere... when they say 'take the bad with the good' that doesn't mean not doing anything about the bad, and the difference a government can make in dealing with the bad is huge.
I agree with you, however they still tend to act mostly after some damage has been done. That's the purpose of the socialist market economy, to allow development of productive forces but catch it when it goes wrong. That doesn't mean capitalists are prevented from making harmful decisions to begin with. The difference with Hong Kong is that there's basically no catching, it just gets worse and worse.
As I said, a typical recent example was the housing bubble the government had to step in to catch. It was allowed to go on for a while before it was stopped, and it did harm people during that time.
It's not getting worse here in Hong Kong, it's slowly getting better. The British brainrot is taking a long time to unfuck; there are full grown adults who were babies at the handover passing down romanticised stories about British rule to their kids that they were told by their boomer parents, and the eldest generation who remember how it was practically apartheid pre-Maclehose reforms are all elderly. But the education system and the reality checks from what's happening in the States, Ukraine and Palestine are all pushing back.