HONG KONG: Technology company Baidu on Monday denied a newspaper report that its artificial intelligence chatbot Ernie was linked to Chinese military research.

Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post on Friday cited an academic paper from a university affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army cyberwarfare division. The paper said the division had tested its artificial intelligence system on Baidu’s Ernie and artificial intelligence firm iFlyTek’s Spark, both of which are language-based AI chatbots similar to ChatGPT.

After its Hong Kong-listed stock fell more than 11.5% on Monday, Baidu denied the allegations, saying in a statement that it had not engaged in commercial collaboration with the paper’s authors or their affiliated institutions.

“Ernie Bot is available and ready to be used by the general public,” the Chinese company said in its statement.

An academic paper from the PLA Information Engineering University details how researchers prompted the Ernie bot to generate a fake military response plan for Libyan troops in response to a US military attack.

Baidu said that if the authors had employed a larger language model like Ernie Bot, they would have used the functions available to any user interacting with such an AI tool.

Like ChatGPT, users can pose questions or requests to Ernie Bot, which will generate content based on an initial prompt. Like many other Internet services in China, Ernie Bot is subject to censorship regulations and will not answer questions deemed politically sensitive or taboo by the Chinese government.

The South China Morning Post report initially described a “physical link” between Ernie and the PLA division. The reference has been modified to say that the PLA laboratory had tested its system on Baidu’s AI models.

The decline in Baidu’s share price underlined investors’ fears that Chinese technology companies linked to the Chinese military or government could be sanctioned by the US in the same way as Chinese telecom giant Huawei, which the US views as an espionage risk.

Relations between China and the United States have deteriorated in recent years due to disagreements over trade, technology and issues related to Taiwan, a self-ruled island and U.S. ally that China considers a rebel province that can be invaded if needed. Can take possession by force.

Baidu, which operates China’s dominant search engine and is one of the country’s leading artificial intelligence firms, plans to release Ernie Bot to the public in August 2023 amid a race among Chinese technology companies to produce a ChatGPT equivalent. Made available for.

The Beijing-headquartered company said in December it had more than 100 million users of Ernie Bot.

(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – The Associated Press)