ChinAI #318: Her husband gifted 16 million RMB to a female streamer
Greetings from a world where…
they’re looking for the richest fool in the livestream room
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Feature Translation: The Aftermath — Her husband gifted a female streamer 16 million RMB
Context: Ou Qing, a 37-year-old woman in Fuzhou, recently sued her husband Chen Ping and livestreamer Lili.1 In 202, she had discovered that her husband had tipped more than 16 million RMB in gift on a livestreaming platform, mortgaging nearly all the family property and incurring heavy debts. Ou Qing is not alone. The China Judgements Online website shows 302 civil cases involving “livestreamers” and “live rewards.” According to this SCMP article, livestream gift donations in China reached 140 billion RMB in 2019 and is projected to increase to 417 billion RMB by 2025. In this longform article (link to original Chinese) from Guyu Studio [谷雨工作室], part of Tencent News, we learn more about the phenomenon of “top-tipping big brother [榜一大哥].”
Key Passages: After putting her kid to sleep, Ou Qing watched Lili’s stream for hours deep into the night. She posted her husband’s real name in the comments — “Chen XX pay back the money” — but she kept getting blocked by the moderator of Lili’s livestream. The mod, who was a level-58 fan of Lili, went by the username “Chinese Manyleaf plant with snow from the previous year”2 This top tipper was her husband, Chen Ping. That night, Chen gifted Lili more than 200,000 RMB.
The article gives context: “As she thinks back now, her husband’s abnormal behavior had long eroded their marriage. When their child was about six months old, they began to sleep in separate rooms. He got off work later and later, often coming home at 10 o'clock in the evening. He also had to accompany clients on weekends. When he got home, he put on headphones, saying that it would not affect her and the child. He often smiled foolishly at his phone, typing while laughing. He even took his phone into the shower, then hid in the second bedroom and slept until noon the next day before going to work. Chen Ping is an executive in his father's company and has free time.”
One time when she was shopping at Sam’s Club, she logged into her husband’s WeChat (the membership card was bound to his account) and saw a message from a girl named Lili. The article continues, “Ou Qing felt something was wrong and subconsciously clicked on her husband's WeChat Moments (similar to Facebook’s Newsfeed). She saw a completely different husband. This version of him was rich and talkative. He posted Moments almost every day, showing the weather, mood and late-night snacks - when he should have gone to bed, he and the livestreamer were ‘eating midnight snacks in the cloud’. And this was all blocked from her…There were many dynamics in his WeChat Moments that were hidden from her, screenshots of livestream rewards and the VVVIP trophy sent by Platform A (Jeff’s note: the article does not disclose the name of the livestreaming platform) . Chen Ping set it to be visible to only two people, one of whom was Lili.”
It’s important to map out the environment that creates these extreme cases.
The quest to be top dog: “When you click into a random livestream room, it is hard not to notice the most mysterious users. Most of them are men, with the highest (fan) levels by far, generous gifts, eye-catching special effects, and even the color and font of their name ID are different. Everyone calls them the “top-tipping big brother [榜一大哥]”. There are both men and women who give rewards, but the most widely praised is the top-tipping big brother. Their appearance needs to be watched, and the platform will remind everyone that ‘the big man is here.’”…In the livestream room, the top-tipping big brother is like a ‘god’.”
When Ou Qing sorted through all of her husband’s virtual gifts in a spreadsheet, she found that he mainly tipped two people. According to Guyu Studio’s reporting, “In 2020, he was the top brother of anchor Xia Tian, giving about 1.2 million in rewards. Later, Xia Tian fell in love and quit the Internet, and a new anchor Lili started. At the end of 2020, a ‘live-streaming guild’ [公会] transferred Xia Tian's top-tipping big brother - that is, Chen Ping, to Lili who was part of the same guild as Xia Tian.” I had never heard of these guild before, but they are the behind-the-scenes manipulation experts that try to optimize the performance of livestreamers.
Livestreamers have adopted many tactics to entice more gifts, including PKs and blind boxes. In PKs, two streamers compete head to head, and the streamer that earns more tips will win. As for blind boxes, giving a certain amount of virtual gifts lets you play a mini-game or enter a lottery, and if you finish the treasure hunting game, for example, you can get a box that contains cheering sticks or other special effects that enhance the interactive experience with the livestreamer.
Firsts half of FULL TRANSLATION (depending on interest, I might finish second half next week): The Aftermath: Her husband gifted a female streamer 16 million RMB
ChinAI Links (Four to Forward)
Should-read: Zhibo gonghui: China’s ‘live-streaming guilds’ of manipulation experts
In this Information, Communication, and Society article, a group of four Chinese scholar dive deep into the world of guilds that function as membership organizations for livestreamers. They challenge the assumption that livestreamers work alone.
Should-read: The influence of AI Friendship Apps on users' well-being and addiction
I think one of the neglected risk of AI is addiction spirals. Using netnography and a quantitative survey of AI friendship app users, Hannah R. Marriott and Valentina Pitardi find that “users’ loneliness and fear of judgment, together with AI sentience and perceived well-being gained, increase addiction to the app, while AI ubiquity and warmth reduce it.”
Should-read: Verification of Frontier AI
The UN Scientific Advisory Board authored a helpful brief on verification of different properties of frontier models. They write: “In a setting without cooperative access and trust, such as between geopolitical rivals, it would require improving the security of relevant hardware and software components to make them capable of detecting and responding to tampering attempts.”
Should-read: John S. Foster Jr., Pentagon scientist who developed warheads, dies at 102
Dr. Foster, who served as the director of Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Lab and as the Pentagon’s director of defense research and engineering, passed away last month. He was a champion of permissive action links (PALs) and played an important role in the U.S. sharing information on PALs with the French. When researching my article on the history of U.S. nuclear safety and security assistance to other countries (as a template for cooperation on AI safety), I saw his legacy reflected in now declassified materials. For those interested, I’ll share some of my notes from the archives that mention Foster below:
Cable from Dr. John S. Foster, Director of Defense Research and Engineering, to Jean Blancard -- (French) Delegate Minister for Armaments, ” 15 November 1971, Top Secret
On walking “a fine line” about divulging information about PALs but not too many details: “we would be able to discuss the general principles of safe nuclear designs, as well as the types of electrical and mechanical components which are used to assure that an inadvertent or unauthorized nuclear detonation will not occur.”
Source: documents 29-33 from Wilson Center’s Nuclear Proliferation International History Project
January 4, 1971 memo for M. Nutter from Morse (U.S. DAS for European and NATO Affairs)
Morse pushed for more international cooperation on nuclear safety: “The subject is safety of nuclear weapons wherein as a matter of principle we should be working closely with interested allies at all times anyway, and even with our potential enemies on occasions. I find it hard to understand why we have not pressed this matter before.” In this memo that references Foster’s interest in deeper cooperation as well, he frame nuclear safety talks with the French as: “logical, harmless and easy starters that could help…in more difficult areas like relaxed computer restrictions, missile help to the French, and more cooperative sharing on R&D or weapon production as Johnny Foster would like.”
Source: John H. Morse papers, box 3, folder 2, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
Thank you for reading and engaging.
These are Jeff Ding's (sometimes) weekly translations of Chinese-language musings on AI and related topics. Jeff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University.
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Ou Qing, Chen Ping, and Lili are all peudonyms.
This is a reference to a medicine that can cure the pain of lovesickness (a plant called Manyleaf Paris Rhizome boiled with snow from the previous year).