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Hello, I'm Natasha Froes, and this is Spectator Out Loud. Each week, we choose three pieces from the magazine and ask their writers to read them aloud.

This week, we've got Ian Williams who asks how China will cope with the rise of AI chatbots.

Kara Kennedy recounts her upbringing in the Welsh murder capital of Ponti Prid,

and Oscar Edmondson makes the case for the BBC World Service.

First up, Ian Williams.

The Chinese Communist Party faces a conundrum.

It wants to lead the world in artificial intelligence,

and yet it's terrified of anything with a mind of its own.

Chinese regulators have reportedly told domestic tech companies

not to offer their users chat

GPT, the Microsoft-funded chatbot that can provide seemingly well-researched answers to pretty

much any question you can think to ask it. China Daily, a CCP mouthpiece, has admitted that the

technology has already gone viral in China.

The paper said that AI could give a helping hand to the US government in its spread of

disinformation and its manipulation of global narratives for its own geopolitical interest.

That's a problem, because spreading disinformation and manipulating

global narratives is exactly what the CCP wants its own Chinese-developed AIs to be able to

do. The party needs to be sure that its chatbots are on message, that their condition

to spew party propaganda on cue,

sidestep politically awkward questions and generally steer clear of anything deemed contentious.

Bots like chat GPT rely on what's called generative AI,

...