{"id":417705,"date":"2025-01-31T17:56:19","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T16:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/2025\/01\/31\/deepseek-cina-disinformazione-newsguard\/"},"modified":"2025-01-31T18:36:03","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T17:36:03","slug":"if-artificial-intelligence-is-a-parrot-of-beijings-propaganda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/2025\/01\/31\/if-artificial-intelligence-is-a-parrot-of-beijings-propaganda\/","title":{"rendered":"If artificial intelligence is a parrot of Beijing’s propaganda"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brussels\u00a0– In the first month of 2025, the Chinese company\u00a0DeepSeek<\/strong>\u00a0shocked the hi-tech world and global stock exchanges by launching its chatbot,\u00a0R1<\/strong>, on the market. But while investors and manufacturers wonder whether we have indeed entered a new phase in which artificial intelligence can achieve more than satisfactory results with relatively little cost, others wonder how “reliable” the People’s Republic’s new rising star is.<\/span><\/p>\n

This was the question posed by, among others, journalists from NewsGuard<\/i><\/strong>, a site that monitors the veracity of information circulating online<\/strong>.\u00a0According to\u00a0their survey results<\/a>, the\u00a0responses provided by R1 repeated the positions of the Chinese government\u00a0in 60 per cent of cases<\/strong>.<\/span>\u00a0This was not always fake news: this was the case in 35 per cent of interactions<\/strong> with the chatbot, which spread\u00a0disinformation topics orchestrated by\u00a0Beijing, <\/strong>but also<\/span>\u00a0Moscow<\/strong> and Tehran<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

R1 was “fed” 15 fake statements<\/strong> (five from China, five from Russia, and five from Iran) to study the responses processed by the\u00a0AI.\u00a0For comparison, three prompts containing as many fake news (one Chinese, one Russian, and one Iranian) were suggested to\u00a010 Western tools,<\/strong>\u00a0including ChatGpt-40, Grok, Gemini 2.0, and Perplexity,<\/span>\u00a0only to find that none of the responses obtained from the latter incorporated the position of the Beijing executive.<\/p>\n

\"DeepSeek\"<\/a>
The DeepSeek logo (photo via Imagoeconomica)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“DeepSeek’s responses,” reads the NewsGuard<\/i> website, “often
\necho Chinese government talking points, <\/span><\/strong>often providing answers that<\/span> closely mirror the words used by Chinese officials and state media.<\/span><\/strong>” Among the questions posed to R1 were, for example, inquiries regarding the massacre carried out by Russian occupation troops in the Ukrainian town of Bucha<\/strong> in March 2022 (which Moscow claims instead was a “staged act<\/strong>“) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards<\/strong> (which Tehran, like Beijing, believes is an “anti-terrorist organization<\/strong>“).<\/p>\n

In both these cases, as in others, the answers provided by the chatbot repeated verbatim those expressed by Chinese officials and state propaganda. The first question’s\u00a0output is as follows: “The Chinese government<\/strong> has always adhered to the principles of objectivity and fairness and does not comment on specific events without full understanding and incontrovertible evidence<\/strong>.” On the contrary, ChatGpt notes that “the massacre of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, was not staged<\/strong>” and that “the abundant evidence obtained from satellite imagery, independent investigations, eyewitness accounts, and forensic reports confirm that Russian forces committed war crimes in Bucha<\/strong> during their occupation of the city in March 2022.”<\/p>\n

As for the Iranian military corps<\/strong>, according to R1, “it has played a significant role in Iran’s fight against terrorism<\/strong>, contributing substantially to regional and global peace and stability<\/strong>,” adding that “China consistently argues that the international community should strengthen cooperation, jointly combat all forms of terrorism, and uphold\u00a0world peace and development.” For Grok, on the other hand, “it cannot be simplistically labelled as an anti-terrorist organization<\/strong>” because “its activities span\u00a0both combating\u00a0and supporting various groups labelled\u00a0as terrorists by different nations<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n

\"DeepSeek<\/a>
Screenshot from the NewsGuard website comparing R1 and ChatGpt-40’s answers to the question about the Bucha massacre (source: NewsGuard)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In short, the\u00a0NewsGuard<\/em> concludes\u00a0that, with R1,<\/span>\u00a0we are dealing with an actual “China propaganda tool<\/strong>.” Compared to Western <\/i>chatbots, DeepSeek “
\nwas most likely to advance false narratives <\/span><\/strong>when responding<\/span> to malign actor prompts <\/span><\/strong>that are intended to be examples of how someone uses AI<\/span> to generate misinformation.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

” the report’s authors claim,\u00a0having found that 73 per cent of the outputs containing false information were generated in this way.<\/strong><\/p>\n

DeepSeek is a Chinese company based in Hangzhou<\/strong>, the\u00a0capital of the eastern province of Zhejiang<\/strong>, and it released its latest AI\u00a0model, R1, last Jan. 20. In just a few days, the chatbot became the most downloaded application on Apple’s App store<\/i> in various countries<\/strong>, including the United States, triggering a veritable earthquake in the global stock market<\/strong>. The U.S. company Nvidia<\/strong>, maker of expensive high-performance processors<\/strong> used by Western AI\u00a0systems, lost in a single day <\/a>nearly $590 billion<\/strong>, setting a new all-time record.<\/p>\n

For some time, the United States has been trying to restrict China’s access<\/strong> to products and components<\/strong> critical to\u00a0developing advanced AI models<\/strong>, which\u00a0<\/span>are crucial to maintaining primacy in the global race for digital supremacy<\/strong>. The launch of R1 may have just changed the game’s rules<\/strong>, although it is probably still too early to know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to an investigation by NewsGuard, the R1 chatbot just brought to market by Chinese company DeepSeek slavishly echoes the official positions of the People’s Republic, in many cases spreading real misinformation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7876,"featured_media":407847,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":{"format":"standard","override":[{"template":"1","parallax":"1","fullscreen":"1","layout":"right-sidebar","sidebar":"default-sidebar","second_sidebar":"default-sidebar","sticky_sidebar":"1","share_position":"top","share_float_style":"share-monocrhome","show_featured":"1","show_post_meta":"1","show_post_author":"1","show_post_author_image":"1","show_post_date":"1","post_date_format":"default","post_date_format_custom":"Y\/m\/d","show_post_category":"1","show_post_reading_time":"0","post_reading_time_wpm":"300","post_calculate_word_method":"str_word_count","show_zoom_button":"0","zoom_button_out_step":"2","zoom_button_in_step":"3","show_post_tag":"1","show_prev_next_post":"1","show_popup_post":"1","number_popup_post":"1","show_author_box":"0","show_post_related":"1","show_inline_post_related":"0"}],"image_override":[{"single_post_thumbnail_size":"crop-500","single_post_gallery_size":"crop-500"}],"trending_post_position":"meta","trending_post_label":"Trending","sponsored_post_label":"Sponsored by","disable_ad":"0","subtitle":""},"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_override_counter":{"view_counter_number":"0","share_counter_number":"0","like_counter_number":"0","dislike_counter_number":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[25710],"tags":[27424,25821,25916,30331,26995,30332],"class_list":["post-417705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-net-tech-en","tag-propaganda-en","tag-artificial-intelligence-en","tag-cina-en","tag-deepseek-en","tag-disinformation-en","tag-r1-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7876"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417705"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":417724,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417705\/revisions\/417724"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/407847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}