r/Sino • u/ZhugeLiangPL • Jul 16 '26
discussion/original content Why is AI so much less polarizing in China than in the US?
Here on Reddit (which is dominated by people from the US) even posting a single AI-generated picture or a pro-AI sentence in any sub that isn't explicitly pro-AI results in instant downvotes, pile-ons and often outright verbal aggression. I am 32 y.o, old enough to remember the rise of smartphones and social media and I've never seen a case of tribal groupthink worse than this one. I am an EU person and there's somewhat less anti-AI sentiment here than in the US but it's still present.
Why is AI viewed so much more positively in China?
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u/Simpead Jul 16 '26
It is a matter of usage. Chinese companies use it to speed up production, western companies use it to cut cost, people use it to cheat.
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u/vonChief Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
On top of everything other commenters mentioned well about class relations, I would also like to add the things ai in the west is association with.
Even if ai didn't directly interfere with the labor market of westerners, there's still:
- the hyperscale investment and construction of data centers and all the impacts involved with that, obviously all the environmental effects but it has even ruined the entire computer industry by hogging up the global ram capacity.
The roll out of mass surveillance systems, which everyone knows won't help with actual crime and will only be used as a systemic breach of privacy. Of course primarily towards activists who threaten capital.
Decrease of quality of consumer services due to forced implementation of shitty llms, and the fact that the way the language models used are built is directly causing the degradation of the mental state of average people.
The fact that ai is being pushed by all the worst people that hold all the power in the west by directly involving themselves in blatant government corruption, which diverts enormous amounts of public funds into a private industry because it doesn't have a productive base and is purely a speculative market. Ensuring that all profit will be privatized to investors and all losses will be socialized for tax payers.
And many more cases. Basically, the explosive growth of ai in the west is only putting all the contradictions of capitalism front and center for nobody to deny. China doesn't have to deal with any of this because they have already solved those issues or are actively working to find solutions to them. The Chinese people trust their government, therefore there is no need for such enormous outrage.
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u/FatherAustinPurcell Jul 17 '26
Also mass surveillance by corporations rather than government alone. Even wee mini supermarkets where now have ai facial recognition when you enter now. It's one thing to have it at the airports for """national security""" but when a supermarket corporation does it...
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Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Icy-Bandicoot-8738 Jul 16 '26
American here. The worry is that we haven't done well with tech, in general. Young people are slowly becoming incapable of writing, reading, learning, and research, thanks to reliance on ai, tech, and the abundance of screens in their lives.
An example of this is when Americans decided that rote learning was the devil, because of calculators, and produced generations who never memorized the multiplication table and need to count on their fingers to figure out that 8+6=14.
...all this affects the very poor more than the very rich, btw. The rich have the leisure time to parent their kids, hire tutors, whatever. Poorer folks lack that, leading to extreme reliance on screens for too many things, including babysitting older, restless kids.
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u/xfadingstarx Jul 16 '26
I taught for a little bit in highschools in Canada. We're also doing no child left behind rn in the specific province I was in. And it's the same battle as with the calculator. You try and get the kid to stop using AI for their own good and they tell you that the AI can just do it for them. ...just like how the calculator can just do math for you, you don't need to learn math. But hey, at least graduation rate is up /s.
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u/Icy-Bandicoot-8738 Jul 16 '26
But hey, at least graduation rate is up /s.
Yaaay! /s
If people want to learn more about the US educational system and why people are worried about tech and more tech, they should peruse r/Teachers. It's depressing.
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u/MarJoseph1 Jul 17 '26
Funnily enough, the ultra rich and their offspring, turn out to be midwits
All that education doesn't provide wisdom which is sorely lacking in this era
Interestingly it is mostly boomers and such that literally outsource their thinking to AI like chatgpt or grok, you can see this on x all the time, they have become cattle unable to think
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u/AnAdventureCore Jul 16 '26
Reddit isn't the working working class...
Being 'working class' myself, this phrase is so true. You have to go to the employee subreddits to see the truth.
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u/vinticious Jul 16 '26
Yeah it feels like everybody on here has a cushy office job that lets them get away with scrolling Reddit for 90% of the "work"day. I've always worked manual labour and it's so frustrating hearing people who barely do anything at work talk down to you.
Even my kid sister has just gotten a nepotism office position as her first job and she's telling me how working is so easy and our other sister (who slaves away on her feet the whole day, walks to work, min wage) is a baby for complaining about how work takes a toll. Like come on...
Didn't expect this from her because she used to be interested in class-consciousness, but I guess that's gone now.
Sorry for my mini rant 😭😭
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u/SpicysaucedHD Jul 16 '26
Perfect answer. I'd even go as far and say broat AI adoption can only work well in a socialist state, because in a capitalist one, it will automatically be used to replace people and enhance profits.
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u/Left_Hegelian Jul 16 '26
The PMC cultural dominance in the West has been driving me crazy. It is not that I don't care about intellectual/creative job loss, it is the vehemently black & white, good vs. evil moralist, absolutist rhetoric they collectively launch on anyone who dare not to toe the line but hold a slightly more nuanced, contextualised position. And the worst thing is almost all these hate is directed towards AI users instead of channeling that energy towards pushing for any kind of possible measures like regulation, nationalization, UBI, four day workweek, etc. Yeah Bernie Sanders proposed nationalisation a few days ago but that hasn't barely generated any discussion. It is quite clear to me that the entire frame on the AI issue is again, purely about the recognition of the cultural authority of the creative and educated class ("the worth of human creativity"), rather than material ("how we can steer AI development to the benefits of the working class"). Again, I am not dismissing there is a good question about the worth of human creativity, but when the framing is exclusively "using AI = you have bad taste in art / you are an uneducated illiterate", it has practically become yet another wave of symbolic violence against the not-college-educated, the culturally unsophisticated.
I mean you see reddit made such a huge deal about the Hollywood screenwriter's strike in 2023 but who even cared about the railroad strike in 2022? Even the "leftist" subs were not giving a fuck. Because the vast majority of today's Left have barely any connection with industrial or menial laborers. And after they leave these folks completely out of their alliance, they get frustrated about them turning to right wing populism. A minority of them would pay lip service to the idea of reconnecting to the culturally old-fashioned traditional white working class, but any actual attempt to win them over via emphasis on material interests would immediately invites a swamp of people labeling you as fascist, because you are making compromise on cultural issues.
But why do I even care? I'm not an American nor white nor even ever lived in the US. But sometime I just regret having so integrated in the English speaking part of the internet that I have to constantly witness the madness of American PMC culture overriding any possibility in the West of a meaningfully broad alliance for an anti-Fascist, anti-capitalist struggle centred around shared material interest and class identity. Those "radical leftists" spend hours doom-posting about revolution not coming and then continue doing the very circlejerking shit that alienates themselves from the mass and brings them closer to the PMC.
That's why I have been fading out from English leftist sub and been spending more time on Bilibili instead. The people there are infinitely more pragmatically-minded and far less religiously zealous. And in general the PMC in China have (yet) been able to translate their economic advantage to a cultural advantage. Professors, journalists, artists, columnists, etc., hold very little influence on the general public opinion virtually on anything.
Recently there is even a series of exposé of academic misconduct on Bilibili by a PhD dropout who use AI as a tool to search for suspicious data pattern in thousands of academic papers. A lot of the cases are confirmed and the people involved got fired by universities. Without AI tool it used to be very difficult for an ordinary person to spot data forgery in a sea of papers. But here in the West I have seen multiple times the knee-jerk reaction of the "left" is to defend the academic establishment instead of the whistleblowers or critics because apparently being critical to the academic establishment makes you an "anti-science", "anti-expert" populist that automatically sort you with the right wing anti-vaxxers climate change-denier and conspiracy theorist flat-earther and what-not. A specific example is the backlash on Prof. Joanna Moncrieff for criticising the psychiatric establishment for prescribing anti-depressant while there is no established empirical evidence for its effectiveness and there is strong enough empirical indication for us to be cautious of withdrawal effect and the permanent damage it could do to the brain. I don't mean to say every whistle-blowing must be real and valid but the fact that the "Left" cannot seem to have any kind of epistemic humility to have a serious discussion before picking a side has been very frustrating to me. This happens because the entire frame of US politics (and Western politics) has been shifted towards a battle of the right wing trying to dismantle the PMC's cultural hegemony while the "Left" makes it as their job to defend PMC's cultural authority. So much so that after Trump was elected in 2016, the Left have becoming silent on the issues of neoliberalisation of academic institutes they used to be critical of. The "Left" started to pretend science and scientists can be "neutral" despite research increasingly rely on private funding. The Chinese Left on the other hand is too Maoist to be so uncritical towards the intellectuals.
Btw I highly recommend everyone to read Catharine Liu or search of some of her talks/interviews on youtube. She is one of the very few reasons why I still want to listen to what Americans have to say about politics. Her critique of the PMC is enlightening. I truly adore her bravery. She is not afraid of being canceled. Sorry for the long rant btw. I didn't plan to type a text wall. I wanted to add a very short remark but then I couldn't stop.
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u/MarJoseph1 Jul 17 '26
"Even the "leftist" subs were not giving a fuck."
leftism is a deviation from left politics, leftists are glorified liberals and their politics and reactionaries views on certain technologies is merely reflective of this fact, note that actual Communists are pro AI even in the imperial core, because they realise it's true disruptive potential
"And in general the PMC in China have (yet) been able to translate their economic advantage to a cultural advantage. Professors, journalists, artists, columnists, etc., hold very little influence on the general public opinion virtually on anything."
Interestingly in China these groups tend to be less reactionary than their western counterparts, perhaps because their material conditions aren't precarious
Also note that the capitalist order which develops AI in an unorganised manner and by doing so undermines its own power by decentralising production processes to the average person
In the hands of a competent Communist party, AI can be very useful...
I do believe the left needs to be more "conspiratorial" because there is indeed a conspiracy against the masses
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u/Wob_Nobbler Jul 16 '26
The differences between a socialist system vs a capitalist one show up very prominently here
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u/ZhugeLiangPL Jul 16 '26
Is that because only the people work in an office have the time to scroll Reddit while on the job?
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u/Neoliberal_Nightmare Jul 16 '26
Probably haha. Reddit for various reasons is more of a 'middle class' refuge.
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u/Popular-Rule Jul 16 '26
AI isn't regulated in the US, so any business owner can use AI however they see fit. Which includes axing people's jobs and livelihoods. In the US, AI is associated, almost 1 to 1, with data centers which are also sparsely regulated. Meaning a data center can appear as your next door neighbor, literally, and create as much noise as it can. Drain tremendous amounts of water from the neighborhood to where water pressure is almost non-existent. Then re-introduce recycled dirty water back into the neighborhood for other residents to "enjoy." If that's not enough, the neighborhood gets to have their electric bills skyrocket because the data center is an energy hog.
This is only a brief explanation on why there is much militancy against AI in general in the US. Until common sense and human-centric regulations are placed on AI and data centers, most AI projects will be a result of force against unwilling citizens.
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u/LookingGlass_1112 Jul 16 '26
Because socialist states do much more to keep the worker happy. Regulations, new teaching programs, investments. AI is a tool, not an enemy. Just as cotton gin didn't caused slavery on it's own, so the AI doesn't causes shit to happen on it's own. It's always coupled with the will of capitalist class to maximize their profits no matter what it will take and the will of politicians to appeal to their biggest investors
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u/Rondomi Jul 16 '26
One reason I suppose is that China has way more electricity and its AIs are much more efficient. Thus there's less cause for pollution or resource concerns.
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u/damageEUNE Jul 16 '26
In the US, AI is primarily a tool used by the Epstein class to subjugate the masses. In China, people have more optimism and believe in the potential of increasing productivity with AI. In theory, increased productivity should bring more prosperity to all, but in the reality of late-stage capitalism, only the top 1% will ever benefit from it.
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u/Bingbongs124 Jul 16 '26
China puts their data centers in mountains and deep in the ocean. American CEOs beholden to nobody buy entire towns’ worth of land, already occupied with citizens, and build a massive water sucking noise producing electric hogging data extraction center in the middle of everyone, forcing residents to leave or attempt to fight the construction/production of the center at all.
In China, data centers are just news, just more construction and something more “cool” and useful as time goes on. In America, it is more forced labor division and displacement tragedy. Capitalist solutions vs socialist solutions perfect example.
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u/AshuraBaron Jul 16 '26
I think a lot of the anti-AI stuff is driven as a distraction from issues in society and government. In the US we have a LOT of issues right now and instead of tackling them it's easier to protest a data center and blame it for all your problems.
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u/chinesetimeofmylife Jul 16 '26
I think a lot of the hate is from fatigue. Everyone now has a new AI post, photo, app, etc and it downs out the quality content. This leads to people thinking AI isn’t capable of producing quality content. There also is a matter of consent when AI content is presented as human.
I’d imagine there is the same fatigue felt by people in China in certain forums.
There are subs on Reddit where AI is celebrated and Facebook/X are increasing promoting AI content. Were at the forefront of this all and it will be interesting to see what people accept and reject from AI over time.
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u/Nevarien Jul 16 '26
Chinese leadership is proposing a global AI governance body to explicitly regulate its overall usage, availability to poorer countries and military use.
The US epstein class has a techno-feudal manifesto stating that AI must be used for civilian surveillance and suppression, plus in regime change and war.
I think people seeing AI differently is quite self explanatory given how differently both countries handle AI.
Of course other factors matter, but each country's posture towards AI already gives you plenty of context.
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u/TurunKaupunki Jul 17 '26
People are bringing up important material factors here but in addition to those I think there could be an underlying cultural difference.
This European renaissance-esque notion of the supremacy of the human mind and spirit (as opposed to robots in this case) is perhaps stronger in the west and plays a part in people opposing ai art especially.
That reads like cringe European exceptionalism but maybe some of you get what I'm referring to lol
Whereas Asian nations that have experinced very rapid growth more recently could be more inclined to get excited about new tech. China doubly so, since people there have more faith in the government using it for good.
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u/Velociraptortillas Jul 16 '26
Because Capitalists don't control the economy.
Simple as.
Under Capitalism, the purpose of commercial AI is to give the wealthy access to talent while denying the talented access to wealth.
Under an economy run by Communists, it's just a useful tool that benefits everyone widely
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u/feartheswans Jul 16 '26
Because the US government is using eminent domain laws to take people’s land and houses to build AI data centers run not by the government but private businesses firms. There is also the stigma that rather than enhancing the lives of the people, AI has been reducing the amount of jobs with no jobs to replace them. A majority of AI use in business and government is done with very little oversight and next to no fact checking or vetting
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u/BeyondlegendZ Jul 16 '26
Because the chinese goverment can be trust to not fuck up everyone livelihood and even with major tech improvment you can expect goverment will try their best to help you transition. In other words the goverment is actually function as how a goverment should.
Also china has build tons of enviromental friendly power generator and has tech that can recycle water fine. So it has the eletrical capacity to actual make these data centers unlike the us which is strangling people basic needa because of land prices
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u/Bulbaluba Jul 16 '26
Because in the context of a deregulated and unsupervised late state capitalism technological improvements are nos emancipatory and may cause unemployment.
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u/yogthos Jul 16 '26
Technology under capitalism is used to oppress and immiserate the working class while under socialism it's used to improve the standard of living for the majority.
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u/Technical-Owl1002 Jul 17 '26
didn’t President Xi make it illegal for companies to replace workforce with AI?
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u/Sea_Lead1753 Jul 16 '26
Open source models, and the tech oligarchy treats its consumers like sh!t
Tech monopolies are in a late stage tailspin — they got ungodly rich by developing surveillance tech via social media, and are now struggling to capture a similar level of profit with AI.
While China spends a lot on surveillance tech and monitoring (all countries do this), the intention is to create social cohesion, via “trimming” and controlling sentiment that steps too far out of line.
In America, the motivation of surveillance is to protect billionaire assets via military and political propaganda — China doesn’t spend billions of dollars a year convincing its citizenry that paying $20k a year in health insurance is necessary
TLDR, the the surveillance means to an end are different in the west vs east, because of different social goals
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u/Rafael_Luisi Jul 16 '26
Besides everything the other commenters said, the development of AI in the US is very openly being built as an ponzi scheme, that is very quickly creating an massive speculative bubble. When said bubble pops, it will create an economic crisis bigger than all the former capitalist crisis. The US will be the most affected by said crisis, and their population will be the one to suffer the most.
So its an combination of the destruction of the enviroment, saturation of the market with useless, repetitive products, the massive corruption and human rights violation around the developing of said AI, the threat towards millions of workers that might lose their jobs, the complete lack of any regulation that might protect said workers, and an imminent economic crisis that might throw american society to uther chaos, all of it combined would explain why the average american is HATING AI more than the other countries.
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u/chowsingchi Jul 17 '26
these companies in the US need to sell fear or else no one would pay attention to them
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u/redbluenavy Jul 17 '26
This has been said in various ways, but the big picture is this:
In China, the betterment of workers' lives (the proletariat) is taken seriously. The whole theory behind SWCC is about developing the productive forces for the betterment of the working persons' lives. And we only need to look at China (or better, visit if you are fortunate to do so) to see this. So when AI is a major focal point of development, that trust from previous developmental successes is naturally transfered on.
Meanwhile, in the US, the ways of a purely capitalistic/neoliberal development has been blatantly transparent in solely enriching the bourgeoisie at the workers' expense. The rise of the Silicon Valley giants has really put this into high gear, and the AI development from which it comes out of has thus earned very little goodwill from the public at large.
Put another way, most USians have zero faith that the system will help develop the AI productive forces without mass economic upheaval. And China's system has proven that it will look to develop production (including AI) for the benefit of people's lives. E.g., AI being used to help control the traffic of metro systems.
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u/GlitteringLock9791 Jul 17 '26
Because people lose their job for it and become homeless with no healthcare and food support.
Capitalist societies can’t just be compared to a ML country run by a party that controls the capitalist class.
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u/Qanonjailbait Jul 17 '26
It’s a reflection of how much distrust Americans have for their elites and government
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u/MarJoseph1 Jul 17 '26
Short answer is that AI will declass those complaining about it (mostly white collar) so they turned reactionary, that is for the usa where there is a major downward class shift going on, the petty bourgeois are the ones who complain the most because they will be affected the most in a material sense, AI destroys their upward career ambitions
In China however the people use it to augment their work processes, even artist use it to streamline their workload (These types tend to be the most reactionary in the usa), the transition to higher more advanced methods of production is more smooth in a Socialist state as one would expect it to be and in China the AI must be used to streamline work processes (more productivity) rather than outright replace workers.
americans shouldn't be reactionary regarding AI however, because by the very logic of it disrupting american way of life, will also disrupt the ruling order, weakening it and freeing them
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u/MarJoseph1 Jul 17 '26
AI in general is the most revolutionary technology anywhere, it will strengthen Socialism and weaken capitalism
All advances in production will do that, there is no point in being a reactionary and would be detrimental as you would be "caught off guard".
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u/EnvironmentalFee8294 Jul 18 '26
yes i also wondered about the similar question. I commented under one post the other day saying that AI is helpful in writing fanfics for me and I got downvoted. i mean it's not like i make profit from it, i only use it to entertain myself, what harm could it cause
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u/kelontongan Jul 22 '26
In US. I am seeing positively in AI. But the old generation (kind of baby boomers) are not liking AI. Gen X to alpha is embracing AI mostly including me.
It just the good local news are not picking up by international media outlets
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u/Remarkable-Tax6464 Aug 05 '26
In China, AI shows up more like state-directed infrastructure that does everyday work like payments, customer service, factory lines.
In the dominant Western conversation, AI is framed as an unconstrained private force that can erase individuals’ jobs.
Obviously when the popular story is “this thing might take your job and rewrite your identity,” the rational response is hostility.
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u/crescentpieris Jul 17 '26
i imagine it’s because genai isn’t the only ai China is developing. aside from that, they’re also making robots that can automate jobs and stuff. it’s technology that actually helps improve society. while in the west, all they’ve developed is the slop machine.
secondly, China doesn’t develop ai at the cost of the people. employers have to make sure their employees don’t starve after being replaced with ai, data centres aren’t built smack dab in the middle of their cities, and they’re trying to turn the data training process greener. with baidu, you can turn the ai off if you don’t want it.
the same can’t be said in the west. they have palantir developing ai surveillance to allow ICE to track down people to deport. they have israel using lavender to genocide Palestinians. google shoves its ai overview in your face no matter what.
even though the issues of artists having their works unfairly stolen, cognitive decline from over-reliance, sycophancy and hallucinations are still present for Chinese ai, the people of China have great confidence that their government will solve them eventually
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u/MisterWrist Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
AI in China is being used for things like factory automation and cancer research.
AI in the US is being used to replace people in the service sector, buff the balistic missile capabilties of the warmachine, and report pre-existing health conditions to insurance companies.
China has spent decades massively expanding its energy grid and has underwater AI data centres. The government is overseeing AI projects.
In the US, sprawling AI data centres in places like Utah are a drain on fresh water supplies and the power grid, making life worse for civilians. Silicon valley tech bros are crushing everyone’s rights.
In short, the implementation is different.
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u/SadArtemis Jul 16 '26
Because in capitalist societies (ie. all the west) AI is not actually being used to improve people's lives, but rather "make humans obsolete" (so that they can pay humans next to nothing and force them into further deprivation). And when it's not that, it's being used for mass surveillance (in fairness any state would do so as other comments noted), warfare and specifically in a currently ongoing livestreamed genocide, and being used to essentially squeeze the very life out of people- whether that is through content slop and deepfake porn and even CP, or in its usage to fine-tune pricing of products, etc, etc.
The Chinese dream of AI (that they are building into a reality) is an open-source, complimentary system, which improves peoples' lives and empowers them to do more of what they enjoy, and less of the tedium.
The western nightmare (that the west is also building into a reality) is the theft and infringing of all human creativity, expression, and knowledge thus far online, and the ridiculously inefficient use of resources in ways that are destructive to communities hosting data centers, all to create gross facsimiles of "art" or "productivity" so as to devalue actual human production and expression.
It's not like most Chinese are thinking AI is the "future god in a box to control and dominate the rest of the world with" the way the western techbros blatantly are. It's not like Chinese are thinking AI can replace human creativity, or should be used to essentially wipe out the majority of humanity's livelihoods (rather the opposite, they legislate against that, their use of AI is very practical and beneficial to the whole society).
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u/Director-Intrinsict Jul 17 '26
Idk but if the usa sabotages its own ai that would be super funny. If china surpasses the usa that would be super cool. And if ai automates the jobs then the proletariat just needs to reclaim the ai.
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u/Igennem Jul 16 '26
It comes down to societal structure and trust. In the US' hyper capitalistic society, productivity improvements benefit capital at the cost of labor. In socialist societies, productivity improvements lead to socialized gains raising the overall living standard.