China’s A.I. Advances Help Its Tech Industry, and State Security
China’s A.I. Advances Help Its Tech Industry, and State
Security
By PAUL MOZUR and KEITH BRADSHER DEC. 3, 2017
BEIJING — During President Trump’s visit to Beijing, he
appeared on screen for a special address at a tech conference.
First he spoke in English. Then he switched to Mandarin
Chinese.
Mr. Trump doesn’t speak Chinese. The video was a
publicity stunt, designed to show off the voice capabilities of iFlyTek, a
Chinese artificial intelligence company with both innovative technology and
troubling ties to Chinese state security. IFlyTek has said its technology can
monitor a car full of people or a crowded room, identify a targeted
individual’s voice and record everything that person says.
“IFlyTek,” the image of Mr. Trump said in Chinese, “is
really fantastic.”
As China tests the frontiers of artificial intelligence,
iFlyTek serves as a compelling example of both the country’s sci-fi ambitions
and the technology’s darker dystopian possibilities.
The Chinese company uses sophisticated A.I. to power
image and voice recognition systems that can help doctors with their diagnoses,
aid teachers in grading tests and let drivers control their cars with their
voices. Even some global companies are impressed: Delphi, a major American auto
supplier, offers iFlyTek’s technology to carmakers in China, while Volkswagen
plans to build the Chinese company’s speech recognition technology into many of
its cars in China next year.
At the same time, iFlyTek hosts a laboratory to develop
voice surveillance capabilities for China’s domestic security forces. In an October
report, a human rights group said the company was helping the authorities
compile a biometric voice database of Chinese citizens that could be used to
track activists and others.
Those tight ties with the government could give iFlyTek
and other Chinese companies an edge in an emerging new field. China’s financial
support and its loosely enforced and untested privacy laws give Chinese
companies considerable resources and access to voices, faces and other
biometric data in vast quantities, which could help them develop their
technologies, experts say.
China “does not have the stringent privacy laws that
Western companies have, nor are Chinese citizens against having their data
collected, as (arguably speaking) government monitoring is a fact of China,”
analysts with the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein wrote in a report in
November.
Already, China’s companies have at times edged out
foreign rivals. IFlyTek has won major competitions for speech recognition and
translation. Two years before Microsoft did, Baidu, the Chinese internet search
company, created software capable of matching human skills at understanding
speech. This year the Shanghai-based start-up Yitu took first place in a major
facial recognition contest run by the United States government.
IFlyTek and other Chinese companies say they follow
China’s laws and protect user data. But they agree that the sheer number of
users in China, plus the government’s single-minded drive to dominate the new
technology, puts them at an advantage.
“China has entered the artificial intelligence age
together with the U.S.,” said Liu Qingfeng, iFlyTek’s chairman, at the Beijing
conference. “But due to the advantage of a huge amount of users and China’s
social governance, A.I. will develop faster and spread from China to the
world.”
An iFlyTek spokeswoman said the company had yet to
receive required permission from officials in Anhui, the Chinese province where
it is based, to speak with the foreign news media.
IFlyTek is portrayed in the Chinese media both as a
technology innovator and as an ally of the government. Last year iFlyTek helped
prevent the loss of about $75 million in telecommunications fraud by helping
the police target scammers, according to The Global Times, a nationalist
tabloid controlled by the Communist Party. Its article quotes a Chinese
security official as saying collecting voice patterns is like taking
fingerprints or recording people with closed-circuit television cameras,
meaning the practice does not violate their privacy.
“We work with the Ministry of Public Security to pin down
the criminals,” said Liu Junfeng, the general manager of the company’s
automotive business, at a conference in September.
Where iFlyTek gets its data is not clear. But one of its
owners is China Mobile, the state-controlled cellular network giant, which has
more than 800 million subscribers. IFlyTek preloads its products on millions of
China Mobile phones and runs the hotline service for China Mobile, which did
not respond to a request for comment.
“Data is gold,” said Anil Jain, a professor who studies
biometrics at Michigan State University. “These days you cannot design an
accurate and robust recognition system for anything” without data.
Cars could be another major market, iFlyTek believes.
China is pioneering a push into self-driving cars, which could heavily depend
on voice technology. In September, iFlyTek introduced a new product, a glowing
ellipsoid that mounts on a dashboard and listens for questions that it can
check online, like a car-mounted Siri.
“We have to understand if the car is our friend, if there
is an emotional connection,” Mr. Liu said.
Through a third-party supplier, a few hundred thousand of
the four million cars that the Volkswagen Group sells in China annually will be
equipped next year with iFlyTek voice recognition technology, said Christoph
Ludewig, a spokesman for the German automaker. Volkswagen said it requires that
any data gathered from drivers is kept anonymous.
“Volkswagen will protect customers from the misuse of
their data,” Mr. Ludewig said.
Delphi, the American auto parts giant, said it had a
relationship with iFlyTek to offer its services in China but declined to
disclose details.
Mr. Liu, the head of iFlyTek’s automotive business, said
that the company’s systems would be installed next year in some Jeeps sold in
China and that it was developing automotive voice systems with Daimler, which
owns the Mercedes-Benz brand. FiatChrysler, Jeep’s parent, said it had not
found any of its suppliers using iFlytek. A Daimler spokeswoman said that the
company was regularly in discussions with potential suppliers but declined to
say if iFlyTek was one of them.
Human rights groups worry that such rapidly evolving
capabilities will be abused by China’s autocratic government.
“The Chinese government has been collecting the voice
patterns of tens of thousands of people with little transparency about the
program or laws regulating who can be targeted or how that information is going
to be used,” Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s China director, wrote in a
report in October.
In its home province of Anhui, iFlyTek has assembled a
database of 70,000 voice patterns, according to the report, which also said
that the police had begun collecting records of voice patterns as they would
fingerprints. The report cited as one example three women suspected of being
sex workers whose voices were registered in a database, it said, in part
because they had been arrested in Anhui.
The local Chinese media has also reported about a new
plan in Anhui to scan voice calls automatically for the voice-prints of wanted
criminals, and alert the police if they are detected.
IFlyTek did not respond to requests for comment on the
Human Rights Watch report but has said its data-gathering efforts will not
stop, particularly as it participates in China’s push to develop self-driving
cars.
“We are always talking about big data — the vehicle
produces many images every day,” said Mr. Liu, the iFlyTek automotive
executive.
Paul Mozur reported from Beijing and Keith Bradsher from
Tianjin and Guangzhou, China. Ailin Tang contributed research from Beijing and
Carolyn Zhang from Shanghai.
A version of this article appears in print on December 4,
2017, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Pushing A.I. Boundaries
in China.
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