China Unveils Artificial Intelligence ‘Prosecutor’ That Can Identify Dissent Against Regime, And Suggest Sentences

China Unveils Artificial Intelligence ‘Prosecutor’ That Can Identify Dissent Against Regime, And Suggest Sentences

After creating the world’s largest surveillance network, China has deployed an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) machine to run its judicial system. The state-run judiciary developed the AI machine and has been tested in the eastern Chinese city of Shanghai, the Hong Kong-based newspaper South China Morning Post reported.

This is not the first AI tool used in the Chinese courts. “Prosecutors in China already use an AI tool to evaluate evidence and assess how dangerous a suspect is to the public,” the Hong Kong daily added.

The newly-unveiled AI ‘prosecutor’ can recognize anti-regime dissent and suggest punishment based on the Chinese criminal law. “The dystopian machine can identify ‘dissent’ against the state and suggest sentences for supposed criminals, removing people from the prosecution process,” the UK newspaper Daily Mail noted.

The South China Morning Post reported the unveiling of the new artificial intelligence machine:

Researchers in China say they have achieved a world first by developing a machine that can charge people with crimes using artificial intelligence.

The AI “prosecutor” can file a charge with more than 97 per cent accuracy based on a verbal description of the case, according to the researchers.

The machine was built and tested by the Shanghai Pudong People’s Procuratorate, the country’s largest and busiest district prosecution office.

The technology could reduce prosecutors’ daily workload, allowing them to focus on more difficult tasks, according to Professor Shi Yong, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ big data and knowledge management laboratory, who is the project’s lead scientist.

“The system can replace prosecutors in the decision-making process to a certain extent,” said Shi and his colleagues in a paper published this month in the domestic peer-reviewed journal Management Review.

The introduction of the advanced artificial intelligence prosecutor comes as China has established the world’s largest spying network to monitor and regulate the behavior of its population. The Chinese Communist Orwellian project uses more than half of the world’s surveillance cameras to spy on 1.4 billion Chinese people. Besides cameras, Beijing uses facial recognition, smartphones, and e-commerce data to keep track of the everyday activities of its ordinary citizens.

Besides targeting dissidents, the artificial intelligence-aided surveillance is used for ‘behavioral engineering’ the country’s population. Xi Jinping’s regime is resorting to mass surveillance, not just brute force, to ensure loyalty to himself and the Communist Party.

Beijing is not limiting artificial intelligence to commercial and domestic spying operations. Recent studies suggest that the Chinese military is betting big on AI and other emerging technologies. “The Chinese military and China’s defense industry have been pursuing significant investments in robotics, swarming, and other applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML),” a 2020 report by the Brookings Institute said.

Beijing is using artificial intelligenc in a myriad of military-related applications. A recent report by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a think tank based at Georgetown University, “found that the Chinese military is ‘intelligentizing’ warfare by purchasing AI systems for all manner of applications, including … intelligence analysis, decision support, electronic warfare and cyber operations,” Politico reported in October.

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