Soon a Russian ChatGPT? While the conversational artificial intelligence launched a few months ago continues to be talked about, Russia unveiled its own project on Monday April 24. Named “GigaChat”, this computer program must also be able to generate texts of all kinds, giving the impression of conversing with a human.
“A first” for Moscow, welcomed the public company Sber, the origin of this tool. The idea: to build a Russian twin brother, and under Putin’s control, of ChatGPT, developed by the American start-up OpenAI. What feed fears and fantasies, while these programs can be used to produce misinformation, by serving as scribes, or contain significant bias, because of the data used by the machine to produce its answers.
According to Sber, GigaChat can “have a conversation, write texts, answer factual questions”, but also “write computer code” and “create images from descriptions”. The perfect paraphernalia to flood the web with content, when Russia is already accused of carrying out major disinformation campaigns around the world.
As it stands, GigaChat is mostly an attempt to catch up with the United States. Many countries have promised to get their AI in recent weeks. On March 17, the Chinese Internet giant Baidu notably launched “Ernie Bot”, a similar product. Other Chinese companies like Alibaba or ByteDance (parent company of TikTok) are working on their own model.
A propaganda agent?
Since the implementation of Western sanctions against Russia for its offensive in Ukraine, Moscow has been seeking to strengthen its digital sovereignty. An essential sector: tools such as ChatGPT allow significant productivity gains, by assisting a good number of writing tasks (analysis report, online conversations, etc.). “Whoever becomes the leader in this field will be the master of the world,” Vladimir Putin even declared in September 2017, during a conference in front of Russian students.
But at the same time, Russia has also strengthened its legislative arsenal governing the Internet and the media, censoring a large part of Western content, and also opposition. In other words, if GigaChat is deployed in Europe, it risks, for example, making the Russian invasion of Ukraine look like a “special operation”, according to the prevailing rhetoric. A problem, while ChatGPT is already accused of spreading false information, claiming enormities without nuance.
GigaChat still needs to survive development outside of Russia. Functionally first. Whether, according to Sber CEO German Gref, the tool is “a breakthrough for the entire vast universe of Russian technologies”, has yet to be proven. Since the war in Ukraine, many Russian scientists have left the country, which is also struggling to attract the best researchers in the field.
Another question: how will the tool be perceived by regulators, French and European? Its Western counterpart ChatGPT is the subject of intense negotiations in Brussels, which wants to regulate its use, with its “IA Act”. According to the latest version of the text being drafted, the European Union would even reserve the right to ban intelligent systems presenting an “unacceptable risk” to human rights. ChatGPT has already been blocked in several schools or universities around the world, after fears of cheating in exams, and companies have advised their employees not to use the application.
