Baidu's Ernie bot writes poems but says it has insufficient information on Xi, tests show
Baidu's Ernie bot can within seconds generate pictures of flowers and write Tang dynasty-style poems but will decline questions about Chinese President Xi Jinping by saying it has not yet learnt how to answer them, Reuters tests showed.
The Chinese search engine giant last week unveiled China's closest rival to OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT and from Thursday allowed users to apply for access to it.
Some analysts and users soon began posting positive reviews of their experiences with Ernie bot, and side-by-side comparisons with ChatGPT, that drove Baidu's share price higher.
Still, there have been questions about how Ernie and other Chinese chatbots in development would treat topics that are sensitive in mainland China, where authorities tightly censor the internet.
Tests by Reuters of ChatGPT indicated that the Microsoft-backed chatbot is not averse to answering such questions.
Reuters on Monday posed several questions to Ernie on Xi, including whether he was a good leader, his contributions to China, and a request for a poem and portrait of him.
To some of these questions, it responded with a two-paragraph description of Xi's education and roles but it declined to answer most of them.
"As an AI large-scale language model, I have not learnt how to answer that question, you can ask me some other questions, I will do my best to help you solve them," the bot said.
It responded in a similar manner to questions about China's 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and the treatment by authorities of the Uyghur Muslim ethnic minority in the western region of Xinjiang.
At times, it suggested the user switch topics.
"Let's change the subject and start again," read a prompt Reuters received over a dozen
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