The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) national internet censor just announced that all AI-generated content will be required to have labels that are explicitly seen or heard by its audience and embedded in metadata. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) just released the transcript for the media questions and answers (akin to an FAQ) on its Measures for the Identification of Artificial Intelligence Generated and Synthetic Content [machine translated]. We saw the first signs of this policy move last September when the CAC’s draft plans emerged.
This regulation takes effect on September 1, 2025, and will compel all service providers (i.e., AI LLMs) to “add explicit labels to generated and synthesized content.” The directive includes all types of data: text, images, videos, audio, and even virtual scenes. Aside from that, it also orders app stores to verify whether the apps they host follow the regulations.
Users will still be able to ask for unlabeled AI-generated content for “social concerns and industrial needs.” However, the generating app must reiterate this requirement to the user and also log the information to make it easier to trace. The responsibility of adding the AI-generated label and metadata falls on the shoulders of this end-user person or entity.
rare chinese government w
Except when the government is immune to this and passes things off as real since it isn’t marked as AI.
not rare. it’s a tool that will be used to silence critics.
you don’t think this will be exploited to hurt people?
yeah, if im going to live in a hypercapitalist shit hole where the internet is rabidly censored and there are no environmental protections, I’d rather have watermarks on the AI slop than nazis everywhere.
Not really rare these days when you compare them to America
For all the humans rights abuses, one has to admit that China is at least ruthlessly efficient.
Not really. Sure, China is able to make unpopular decisions better then democracies, but that makes them inefficient in different directions. E.g. high speed rail in areas where it is not needed but greatly lacking freight trains. Or their housing bubble.
China no doubt has it’s problems. It’s just crazy to think how fast the country has progressed in the last 50 years.