me too.
Anecdotally, one thing I noticed (and was a little surprised by) was that every Chinese student we interacted with about the survey didn't seem to be worried about filling it out at all. Like, it was incredibly casual for them, and they were mostly just amused because conducting a personal survey in China is so uncommon. But that's just vibes; who knows.
I think the crux is that the thoughts of the CCP and Chinese citizens don't necessarily have to have a strong correlation - in many ways they can be orthogonal, and sometimes even negatively correlated (like when the gov trades off on personal freedoms for national security).
I think recent trends suggest the Chinese gov / Xi Jingping are taking risks (especially the tail risks) more seriously, and have done some promising AI safety stuff. Still mostly unclear, tho. Highly recommend checking out Concordia AI's The State of AI Safety in China Spring 2024 Report.
From most of the survey data collected from Chinese citizens so far (e.g., this survey, The Center for Long-Term Artificial Intelligence, this Ipsos survey, and a few other polls), they're consistently reporting low concern on AI risks compared to Westerners. Sometimes this could be due to framing, but our survey explicitly translated many of these Western surveys' questions so we could directly compare results. To be fair, we don't have nearly as much data from China.
Intro
In April 2024, my colleague and I (both affiliated with Peking University) conducted a survey involving 510 students from Tsinghua University and 518 students from Peking University—China's two top academic institutions. Our focus was on their perspectives regarding the frontier risks of artificial intelligence.
In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), publicly accessible survey data on AI is relatively rare, so we hope this report provides some valuable insights into how people in the PRC are thinking about AI (especially the risks). Throughout this post, I’ll do my best to weave in other data reflecting the broader Chinese sentiment toward AI.
For similar research, check out The Center for Long-Term Artificial Intelligence, YouGov, Monmouth University, The Artificial Intelligence... (read 2923 more words →)
Nope, we did it all on our own and no one ever gave us trouble or seemed suspicious. (FWIW I'm a US citizen and my co-researcher is a Chinese citizen.)