‘AI can’t replace me’: Young people in China are upbeat on AI and their country’s own models

Ah, the People's Republic has a new national sport: smuggling ChatGPT past the Great Firewall while insisting the homegrown models are superior. A new NBC News piece reveals that young Chinese workers and students are blithely using American AI systems like ChatGPT despite the official bans, all while proclaiming 'AI can't replace me' and puffing out their chests about domestic models. It's a beautiful three-card monte of cognitive dissonance: outlaw the foreign tech, then use it anyway, then claim you never needed it because yours is better.

The confidence is almost touching — if it weren't so economically delusional. 'AI can't replace me' is the new 'my job is safe because I'm special,' which has historically aged about as well as a carton of milk in a Beijing summer. Meanwhile, the domestic models they're so proud of are apparently good enough to boast about but not good enough to actually use for daily tasks, given they're still sneaking onto Claude and GPT. The Communist Party's AI strategy seems to be 'have your censorship and eat it too,' with the added bonus of pretending the censorship isn't happening.

And let's not overlook the regulatory farce: American AI companies are technically banned, but a quick VPN and a prayer gets you access anyway. The government gets to posture about sovereignty while young people vote with their keyboards for the very models the state claims to reject. It's the perfect metaphor for China's tech policy — all stern decrees on paper, all laissez-faire apathy in practice. Cheers to the great firewall's latest victim: its own credibility.