China’s bureaucrats turn to AI, handwriting robots to cope with official paperwork
- While the tools can be useful for some mundane tasks, they are limited by not being trained on the latest information
- Some officials have also been caught out because their handwritten reports are suspiciously uniform or show sudden improvement
The authorities have yet to produce specific rules on using AI or robotics to write government reports, but there are all already a slew of laws and regulations governing the field, including the recently updated official secrecy law and the State Council’s first AI regulation issued last year.
Some officials have also let their subordinates try out the technology for some routine tasks, although they have warned there are limits to what can be done.
Tim Tian, a section head in the Zhejiang provincial government in eastern China, said some of his younger subordinates are using the latest AI platforms to draft speeches for their bosses and produce reports for the various inspection groups.
“This is quite popular among the younger clerks, who are IT savvy. I saw some of them using AI tools on their screen. I acquiesced and gave them a chance to try it out, as long as the copy they turn in is acceptable,” said Tian, who is in his late 30s.
There are dozens of AI official document writing tools available to China’s millions of officials. Two of the most popular are Miaobi, developed by state news agency Xinhua, and Xinghuo from Shenzhen voice recognition software giant iFlyTek.
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Xinhua launched Miaobi, which means “smart pen”, at the end of last year. Miaobi’s AI is trained on more than 10 million documents owned by the agency and sets the standard for China’s official reports, according to the website.
While iFlytek’s Xinhuo is a general purpose AI writing platform, users can key in a prompt to “make a government official document” and generate writing heavily cloaked in party slogans and terminology.
Both platforms declined to disclose their user numbers, but were used by “tens of thousands” within the first few days of their launch, according to a November report by BanYueTan, a current affairs magazine that is part of the Xinhua group.
But there are limitations to what the AI can do.
Chen, a civil servant with Beijing’s municipal government, said the AI tools do not incorporate the latest policies and directions, so they cannot really produce satisfactory results.
“The main problem is [that the AI] is trained on past writing samples, so they are certainly a bit outdated, Chen said about his experience with the technology.
“I saw it only generates one-size-fits-all writings. If you want your boss’s speech to pack a punch, you can’t use AI,” he said, adding that a lot of official information is classified, as are some policies, and cannot be used to train AI.
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Tian, the Zhejiang civil servant, has observed similar problems, while acknowledging AI can be used for “frustrating and unproductive work” and the drafting of unclassified and mundane documents such as meeting notices.
AI is best at coping with repetitive work, such as different versions of similar reports for the many inspection groups from central, provincial and municipal party and government bodies, he said.
The technology is also being used to prepare learning reports on ideology lessons, which are compulsory for the Communist Party’s more than 98 million members.
All party officials and members are required to attend multiple rounds of various ideological education campaigns, including the study of President Xi Jinping’s political doctrine.
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Chen, the Beijing civil servant, said a combination of AI and robotic tools that can imitate handwriting and costs nearly 1,000 yuan (about US$140) is also finding its way onto the desks of some younger officials coping with the ideological course work.
“Those who have poor handwriting tend to use such technology because they are afraid their bosses will think they are sloppy. In officialdom, good handwriting matters, as Chinese believe it represents the person’s character,” he said.
But users have been caught by their superiors because their submissions look too uniform – some of the robots use only built-in or commonly available Chinese fonts – or because of the sudden improvement in their skills, according to Chen.
A search of China’s e-commerce platforms reveals a number of high-end handwriting robots that are taught to mimic the owner’s penmanship by analysing photographed examples of their work.
“But this will defeat the purpose of those who want the robot to show better handwriting. Nothing is perfect in life, including AI and robots,” Chen said.
