Some officials are letting their subordinates try out the technology in some daily tasks, but warn there are limits to what it can do.
Tim Tian, a section manager in the government of eastern China’s Zhejiang province, said some of his junior subordinates are using the latest AI platforms to draft speeches to their superiors and reports for various inspection groups. He said he is creating one.
“This is very popular among young, IT-savvy clerks. Some were even using AI tools on the screen. I silently agreed, as long as the copy they submitted was acceptable. It gave me a chance to try it out,” said Tian, who is in his late 30s.
There are dozens of AI official document writing tools available to millions of Chinese officials. The two most popular are Miaobi, developed by the state-run Xinhua News Agency, and his Xinghuo, from Shenzhen speech recognition software giant iFlyTek.
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Late last year, Xinhua launched “Miaobi,” which means “smart pen.” The website says Miaobi’s AI is trained on more than 10 million documents owned by the agency, which sets the standard for China’s official reporting.
iFlytek’s Xinhuo, a general-purpose AI writing platform, allows users to input the prompt “Create an official government document” to generate sentences with heavily hidden party slogans and terminology.
The Xinhua Group’s current affairs magazine BanYueTan reported in November that “tens of thousands” of people had used the service in the first few days, although both platforms declined to disclose user numbers.
However, there are limits to what AI can do.
Chen, a civil servant in the Beijing municipal government, said that AI tools cannot actually produce satisfactory results because they do not incorporate the latest policies and directions.
“The main problem is that [that the AI] They are certainly a bit outdated, as they are trained based on past writing samples, Chen said of his experience with the technology.
“I found that it only produced one-size-fits-all sentences. If you want your boss’s speech to have punch, you can’t use AI,” he said, adding that, like some policies, many official information is confidential and cannot be used to train AI, it added.
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Tian, a civil servant in Zhejiang province, observed similar issues, but said he doubted that AI could be used for “frustrating and unproductive tasks” or for drafting unclassified, routine documents such as meeting notices. I admit it.
AI is best at dealing with repetitive tasks, such as different versions of similar reports for many inspection groups in central, local and city party and government agencies, he said.
The technology is also used to create study reports for ideological lessons required of more than 98 million Communist Party members.
All Party cadres and members are required to participate in various ideological education campaigns multiple times, including studying President Xi Jinping’s political principles.
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Chen, a civil servant in Beijing, said a tool that combines AI and robotic tools and costs nearly 1,000 yuan (about $140) and can imitate handwriting is also on the desks of some young employees working on ideology classes. He said that it is becoming popular.
“People with bad handwriting tend to use such technology for fear of being seen as sloppy by their superiors.Chinese people believe that it represents a person’s personality, so they do not use such technology in public affairs. Good handwriting is important,” he said.
However, Chen said users often complain that their submissions are too uniform (some robots only use built-in or commonly available Chinese fonts) or that they suddenly lose their skills. It is said that because of his improvement, he is sometimes captured by his superiors.
A search of Chinese e-commerce platforms reveals a number of high-end handwriting robots that can be taught to imitate their owners’ calligraphy by analyzing photographed examples of their work.
“However, this defeats the purpose of people who want robots to display better handwriting. Nothing in life is perfect, including AI and robots,” Chen said.
