The Center for Human Rights at the Catholic University of America has recently published an op-ed by Chen Guangcheng commemorating the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. To view this article, check the link in the description or go to humanrights.catholic.edu.
Will Deatherage: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Barefoot Lawyer Reports on China. My name is Will Deatherage, the producer. Joining me as always is Chen Guangcheng.
Chen Guangcheng: Hello, everyone.
W: Yeah, so today we have a story that is especially pertinent to Guangcheng right here. In the advent of artificial intelligence, there’s a lot of fears about how people can manipulate that, especially politically. And Guangcheng, you’ve got something to report on, don’t you?
G: Yeah, last night, on July 22nd, I opened Twitter. Someone asked me, “Is this you in this video or did someone edit it?”
W: Okay.
G: And then I opened the video, and I’m very surprised. The voice sounds like mine. But of course, I never recorded this video.
W: Right.
G: And so, I tell the person who asked me, I said, “That’s fake. I never made this.”
W: Okay.
G: Yeah, so you can see, even my friend cannot tell the difference. Later, I found the account who uploaded the video on X. I had blocked him before.
W: Okay.
G: That is [the] CCP’s agent. Now, you know, this is a very, very new situation. The CCP’s bad guys can use the new technology, AI, to make fake news.
W: Yeah, Guangcheng, what was the video that they made about?
G: In the videos, they made [it] sound like I was confronting this CCP agent.
W: And this guy has been attacking you online for a while now, right, Guangcheng?
G: Yes. But if you are careful to listen, you can understand this is not me because it sounds like a machine.
W: Yeah.
G: But this is the new situation. If the regime’s spies use the new technology, Western people, the technology engineers, should think [about] how to control the bad situation.
W: Yeah, we looked at the video and it looks like the visual is ripped from an actual video that Guangcheng was in, but the audio is completely AI-generated, is what it looks like they did. So it’s kind of scary what they can do with this technology.
G: If the people online don’t have the experience about this, [it becomes] very easy for rumors to spread.
W: How were people reacting to the video? One thing we noticed is the account doesn’t have many followers, but the video has a lot of views and a lot of comments, right?
G: Yeah. This is a problem. In fact, a lot of [the] CCP’s mouthpieces, they don’t have a lot of followers. But if they share something online, a lot of people [leave] comments like this.
W: Right, it’s very suspicious, right, Guangcheng?
G: Yeah, very; this account may be a robot account. Behind the accounts, I believe that is the CCP or CCP’s agents.
W: Right, I think this one had about 40 followers but the video claimed to have 40,000 views. That doesn’t happen unless it’s planned, right, Guangcheng?
G: Yes.
W: Yeah, and what were the comments saying in response?
G: Yeah, of course, the comments, they are colleagues of the agent. A lot of the comments say some bad words to me, and some people know this is a fake video, they fight them back.
W: Right. Yeah, so especially in a communist country like China where they control the information, this technology could be used for many evil purposes, right, Guangcheng?
G: Yes, yes. So because of this new situation, I want to remind our listeners: you should be careful. This AI video was in Chinese. However, there are already comments on the English videos. I… we think they are from the CCP.
W: Right, you can see them on our YouTube channel, they have poor English and make really outlandish claims about Guangcheng and the podcast, right, Guangcheng?
G: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they will. This is the information war. The CCP tries to control the social media, so I think they will use AI to make some fake news, video or audio, so we should [be] very careful.
W: Yeah, so Guangcheng, do you think eventually they’ll start making English AI videos of you?
G: I think they will, or maybe they did yet.
W: Yeah, but we just don’t know about them.
G: Yeah.
W: Well, we’ll keep an eye out for that, but it’s good for our listeners to know that there’s already videos of you in Chinese going around that are AI generated.
G: I remember 10 years ago, I mentioned [something] about this. Between the CCP and the US, I believe we will have a war. I don’t know what kind of war, maybe the real war, maybe the information war. Now we can see the information war happen in the US.
W: Right, it’s a cyber war.
G: Yeah, so we should think [about] how to kick the CCP out.
W: Yeah. We’ll keep people updated on this situation. We encourage people to visit our website at humanrights.catholic.edu. Alrighty, thank you, Guangcheng.
G: Thank you, Will. Thank you, everyone.
The Catholic University of America’s Center for Human Rights has published a documentary on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The documentary features world-class human rights experts from former state department officials to ambassadors and human rights activists. It can be found on our website at humanrights.catholic.edu.