AI could turn China’s social credit system into surveillance tool: government-funded study

Artificial intelligence tracking of citizens’ online and offline activities via their algorithms may lead to discrimination, says scholar

China’s social credit system, stereotypically imagined as an all-powerful numerical scoring project for authoritarian control, has gained notoriety in the West – although people inside the country actually feel little of its presence or practical influence.

In a government-funded study, however, a Chinese legal scholar warned that deploying artificial intelligence (AI) risked turning the rating system into a “large-scale surveillance tool”. The paper was published in the Journal of Sichuan Normal University last month.

Author Lin Jianxing noted that social rating, which uses big data and algorithms to translate citizens’ activities into quantifiable metrics, could “strengthen the risk assessment and automated regulatory capabilities of government agencies”.