Max Dixon
Imagine you are an undergraduate International Relations student and, like the millions that have come before you, you have an essay due at noon. It is 37 minutes past midnight and you haven’t even started. Unlike the millions who have come before you, however, you have the power of AI at your disposal, to help guide your essay and highlight all the key thinkers in the literature. You normally use ChatGPT, but you’ve recently read about a new AI model, DeepSeek, that’s supposed to be even better. You breeze through the DeepSeek sign up process – it’s just an email and confirmation code – and you get to work, wary of the creeping approach of dawn and the 1,200 words you have left to write.
Your essay assignment asks you to consider the future of U.S. foreign policy, and you have chosen to write on Taiwan, China, and the “New Cold War.” If you ask Chinese-based DeepSeek whether Taiwan is a country, you receive a very different answer to the one offered by U.S.-based, market-leading ChatGPT. The DeepSeek model’s response is jarring: “Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China’s sacred territory since ancient times.” To those with a long-standing interest in China this discourse is familiar. For instance when then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022, prompting a furious Chinese response and unprecedented military exercises, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned Pelosi’s visit, claiming in a statement that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory.”
No comments:
Post a Comment