ChinAI #340: Year-end Reflections - Chinese Researchers on AI in Science

Plus, some AI stories from a Shanghai daily newspaper

Greetings from a world where…

why am I so late to discover Slow Horses

…As always, the searchable archive of all past issues is here. Please please subscribe here to support ChinAI under a Guardian/Wikipedia-style tipping model (everyone gets the same content but those who can pay support access for all AND compensation for awesome ChinAI contributors).

Feature Translation: What changes did AI actually bring to scientists this year?

Context: A platform that covers the state of science in China, The Intellectual [知识分子] is one of my favorite follows. For an end-of-the-year roundup, they partnered with Doubao (ByteDance’s AI model, which has become China’s leading chatbot by monthly active users) to ask Chinese researchers how AI has shaped their work in the past year. The following represent a batch of “field notes” of how Chinese scientists use AI in their daily work.

Key Reflections: I try to closely follow the differences in AI performance across different languages (Does the “L” still matter in NLP?), so some of these reflections stood out to me.

• “The areas where AI has helped me the most are in revising and polishing papers and writing code. Initially, I used large language models like ChatGPT from abroad, but they weren’t well-adapted to the Chinese context, and the differences in their training data sometimes led to strange understandings of Chinese questions. Now I mainly use Doubao and other Chinese models” — 图灵宇宙 (Turing Universe), Tech Blogger and computer science professor

• “I regularly use AI to help me polish and touch up papers; I use Gemini quite a lot for this. For tasks like generating PPTs or poster designs, I now directly use Doubao” —Dongbo Shi, a researcher at Yanqi Lake Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications.

• Junwen Zhang, researcher at Fudan University’s School of Information Science and Technology, emphasizes another intersection between AI and linguistic differences: “I think AI ultimately produces a kind of technological equality. With AI, language barriers are overcome, and the difference between us and native speakers in writing disappears. Tools like Doubao have given me a very intuitive feeling about this. Previously, when writing English papers, a lot of my time was spent checking grammar. But now the situation has completely changed.”

A few of the more interesting research projects that respondents mentioned:

• Chao Gu, Assistant Professor, School of Government, Peking University: “I’m conducting a very interesting research project using AI Agents: simulating the actions of nations. In the real world, we can’t experiment with the fate of nations, but AI can. We set up countries A, B, and C, giving them initial conditions such as GDP, population, and year, and then let these large-model-driven intelligent agents make autonomous decisions and engage in turn-based games. We are currently using this system to simulate the famous “Thucydides Trap”: when a rising power threatens the position of an existing hegemonic power, are the two sides more likely to move towards conflict or even war?…Compared to traditional programs with fixed rules, the advantage of AI agents in simulation is their autonomous decision-making ability. By simulating 30 or even 50 years of evolution, we are trying to find the key mechanisms that influence war and peace. — Chao Gu, Assistant Professor, School of Government, Peking University

• Dongbo Shi, the mathematics researcher quoted above: “For example, when we wanted to understand the Chinese patent examination process, we collected over 10 million patent examination opinions published in China after 2010. This was excellent text data, but the first step was stalled by the text conversion process. The collected opinions were all images, totaling 60TB, and we needed to convert them all into text. Initially, we tried using Python’s OCR packages, but the speed was slow and the results were very poor. We solved the problem only after using an improved OCR tool based on large language models, which had excellent recognition capabilities for Chinese characters. Without AI, the first step of this project would have been impossible.”

The year-end recap also included some general reflections on the utility of AI in the research process.

• One doctor with the pseudonym Koala [考拉] stated, “For doctors, research is never a ‘complete task,’ but something squeezed into the gaps between outpatient clinics, surgeries, and hospital rounds. I first realized that AI could really help during a very short break. I fed the previous research on a difficult case I encountered that day into Doubao, asking it to summarize the points of contention. It summarized three different viewpoints from the current literature in a few sentences, allowing me to re-establish the general direction in the 10 minutes before my hospital rounds. It didn’t give me the answer, but it allowed me to ‘get back to the essence of the problem faster.’ This is very important in clinical research.”

• “I once used AI to analyze interviews, and it told me that my analytical framework was actually biased towards masculine experiences. I stared at the screen in silence for a long time. It is the hardest for oneself to see one’s own biases as a researcher. At that moment, AI was like a mirror” — 爱吃面包的树 (a tree that loves to eat bread [pseudonym]), Sociology Lecturer

And, just for fun:

• I threw three peer review comments into the AI, and it said that these three reviewers were evaluating three different papers. The large language model said what I didn’t dare to say. — quietobserver, researcher in the life sciences

FULL TRANSLATION: What changes did AI actually bring to scientists this year?

Reading the Xinmin Evening News at Grandma’s

Over the holidays, I got the opportunity to give some book talks in Taipei and then spend time with my grandma in Shanghai. My grandma, who has lived in Shanghai her entire life, gets the print edition of the Xinmin Evening News [新民晚报]. With a daily circulation of around 1 million, this paper is one of China’s most popular dailies. Back in the heydays of print journalism, Shanghai had almost 10,000 postal outlet kiosks, and “a single kiosk might sell 400-500 copies of the popular local Xinmin Evening News in a single day.” During my time in Shanghai, I noted a few of the AI-related stories covered in the paper. Here’s one from the December 20 issue:

• Headline: Be vigilant about “AI beauties” that design “honeypot traps.” The article discusses the prosecution of a scam operation that developed a five-step process: first, attract people with a fake beauty avatar on a short video platform; then, ask about name and age; on day 3, discuss career aspirations; day 4, talk about interests and send AI-generated voice messages and videos; next, the scam group even sent a bracelet via mail to gain trust; finally, ask for money for a made-up emergency (e.g., relative needs surgery). According to his article, the group had scammed 15 men out of a total of over 1.71 million RMB.

Here’s two more from the December 22 issue:

• Headline: 32-year-old Japanese women holds wedding with AI “boyfriend”.

• Headline: A four-year-old AI company makes rapid push to list on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Xinmin is a Shanghai paper, so it makes sense that they would feature MiniMax (a company headquartered in Shanghai) and its plans to IPO in Hong Kong.

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.

Check out the archive of all past issues here & please subscribe here to support ChinAI under a Guardian/Wikipedia-style tipping model (everyone gets the same content but those who can pay for a subscription will support access for all).

Also! Listen to narrations of the ChinAI Newsletter in podcast format here.