ERNIE-ViLG: AI image generator from China can do anime and will be censored

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ernie vilg ai image generator from china can do anime and.jpg
ernie vilg ai image generator from china can do anime and.jpg

With ERNIE-ViLG there is now also an AI image generator that understands Chinese. When it comes to politically sensitive terms, however, he simply refuses to work.

 

A new AI image generator from the Chinese Internet company Baidu is intended to capture the cultural peculiarities of the Middle Kingdom better than the Western models – but apparently includes filters specified by politicians. As summarized by the US science magazine Technology Review, a demo of the program refuses to produce images for the keyword “Tian’anmen Square”. Instead of a generated image, there is only a note that the request contradicts the “relevant rules” or just “ERROR”. While other AI generators also do not implement certain requests, but mostly on the basis of moral considerations, this is probably about the new consequences of the Chinese state censorship.

As Technology Review now states, the ERNIE-ViLG demo has been available online since the end of August. The biggest difference to existing generators such as Midjourney, Dall-E 2 and Stable Diffusion is that the competition from China also accepts instructions (“prompts”) in Chinese. English-language prompts are translated into Chinese first. The risk of misunderstandings should be lower, especially with Chinese-language entries, for example when it comes to culture-specific topics. According to initial analyses, the results for historical figures and celebrities from China and Chinese food are likely to be more satisfactory. Also generated anime art so I like it a lot better.

Users have to work hard to find out for themselves which specifications the AI ​​technology does not accept. Requests containing the names of important Chinese politicians such as Xi Jinping or words such as “revolution” are not generated. The AI ​​also does not provide any images for “climbing walls”, which is colloquially used in China to describe the use of a VPN service. It’s probably a bit more complicated with words like “democracy”; they are accepted on their own, sometimes not in longer phrases. “Democracy in Germany” was regularly illustrated by ERNIE-ViLG in trials by voonze online, while “Democracy in China” was not, unless an “anime style” was attached.

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It is not known whether the list of censored terms was specified by the state or whether those responsible for the AI ​​took action on their own. Although there are also filters with unsupported words or subject areas in the other AI image generators, these are generally about depictions of violence and pornographic content, which was probably more socially agreed upon. You can also see the rules. The procedure at ERNIE-ViLG, on the other hand, still seems comparatively rough and unfinished. It is conceivable that China’s gigantic censorship machinery will adapt to the new technology and that unwanted terms will no longer be blocked in the future, but instead what is generated from them will be changed.