Alex Colville

London

Freelance Writer at Freelance

Articles

AI Joins China's Primary Schools

2 weeks ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

On May 13, China’s Ministry of Education released guidelines for integrating AI into the earliest stages of child education. According to the guide, schoolchildren will be introduced to the key concepts driving AI, as well as its basic uses and best practices. By the time students reach high school, they will learn to build simple algorithms of their own. But despite allowing schoolchildren to use AI as a learning aid, the guide prohibits them from using generative AI alone for their work.
Redacting History

2 weeks ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

Last week marked the 17th anniversary of the Wenchuan earthquake, a 7.9 magnitude tremor that devastated Sichuan province and tragically took the lives of nearly 100,000 people. On the May 12 anniversary this year, one particular Wenchuan-related item surged to the top of search engine Baidu and hot search lists on the social media forum Weibo. It involved an impromptu interview given on location one week after the 2008 quake by Li Xiaomeng (李小萌), a reporter from state broadcaster CCTV.
From Mao to MAGA

1 month ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

The Cultural Revolution is barely mentioned in modern China, yet it has never been more relevant. While scholars have long pointed to the excesses of Maoism as a parallel for Xi Jinping’s authoritarian leadership, they have also spotted echoes in the chaotic populist forces Donald Trump has conjured up within American democracy.
China's AI Job Mirage

1 month ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

With 12 million fresh graduates soon rushing into China’s already competitive job market, help is on the way, according to the People’s Daily. On April 7, the newspaper, the official mouthpiece of the country’s leadership, ran an article listing how AI was turbo-charging supply and demand in the job market, pointing to over 10,000 AI-related jobs on offer at a spring recruitment center in the city of Hangzhou.
DeepSeek: A Tool Tuned For Social Governance – Analysis | Flipboard

1 month ago | flipboard.com | Alex Colville

2 days agoPerplexity’s CEO on fighting Google and the coming AI browser warAravind Srinivas discusses his partnership with Motorola, fighting Google, and why AI assistants are coming for browsers. Aravind Srinivas is battling Google to get his Perplexity AI assistant preinstalled on Android phones.
DeepSeek: A Tool Tuned for Social Governance

1 month ago | jamestown.org | Alex Colville

Executive Summary: The government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) does not just envision its “AI+ initiative” as bolstering the national economy but aiding its plans for modernizing its social stability system. DeepSeek has been designed, thanks to regulations, in a way that makes it a perfect tool to support the “public opinion guidance” system that aligns the public with state policy through propaganda.
Bringing AI Down to Earth

1 month ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

As luminaries, including several Nobel laureates, mingled last month at the Zhongguancun Forum, an exchange in Beijing on high-tech innovation, a soaring report from China’s official Xinhua News Agency celebrated the spectacle of robots serving freshly ground coffee and performing backflips — concluding that the forum’s participants had “given aspirations wings to soar.” Judging from the reports filed by the four Xinhua journalists covering the forum, an annual showcase for China’s tech...
Deadly Blunders in Bangkok

2 months ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

As a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar and Thailand last Friday, the temblor rattled buildings across the sprawling Thai capital of Bangkok, home to an incredible 142 skyscrapers. When the shaking ceased all were standing strong — with one very notable exception. The State Audit Office (SAO) building in Chatuchak district, a 30-story skyscraper still under construction by the subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned enterprise, collapsed into a heap of rubble, trapping nearly 100 people inside.
China’s AI Content Dragnet

2 months ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

Hundreds of gigabytes of data lurking on an unsecured server in China linked to Baidu, one of the country’s largest search engines and a major player in the fast-developing field of artificial intelligence (AI), offer a rare glimpse into how the government is likely directing tech giants to categorize data with the use of AI large language models (LLMs) — all to supercharge the monitoring and control of content in cyberspace.
Shrinking Humanities for AI

2 months ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

Shanghai’s Fudan University (复旦大学) is one of China’s most prestigious universities, with a raison d’etre unchanged, it claims, since the institution was founded in 1905: improving China’s position in the world through education. As artificial intelligence takes the world by storm — and becomes a crucial priority from top to bottom in China — the means of achieving that mission is changing, according to the university’s president, Jin Li (金力).