Young Chinese Have Almost No Concerns About AI, Survey Finds

He Qitong and Li Dongxu wrote . . . . . . . . .

Young Chinese hold overwhelmingly positive attitudes toward the rise of generative artificial intelligence and are mostly concerned about how to profit from the new technology, a new survey has found.

Unlike in the West, where public skepticism toward AI runs deep, China’s younger generations appear to be embracing generative AI with few reservations, according to the report by the research institute Just So Soul.

Just So Soul — which is run by Soul, the Chinese social app with over 40 million monthly users — polled nearly 3,500 young Chinese about their views toward generative AI for the report, which was published on Thursday. Around 80% of the respondents were from Gen-Z, the company said.

Over 60% of the young Chinese surveyed said they either “like” or “love” generative AI, while fewer than 3% said they “dislike” or “hate” it. That’s an even more positive response than Just So Soul received in a similar survey last year, when 43% of respondents said they either “like” or “love” the technology.

Young Chinese are regular users of generative AI products, according to the study. Only 4.8% of respondents said they’ve never used generative AI, while over 90% said they have used it.

Younger people were the most likely to regularly use AI products, with 18% of respondents born after 2000 saying they use generative AI “almost every day.” Text generation tools such as ChatGPT are the most popular generative AI products in China, the survey found.

Over half of the young people surveyed said they either already make money using generative AI tools or have plans to do so. The people already using AI to generate income were most likely to work in professions including advertising, communications, and the arts, according to the report.

Though overseas generative AI products aren’t easily accessible in China, a shadow market has quickly emerged in the country in which vendors offer to help users gain access to foreign software tools.

As early as 2022, Chinese vendors were offering to share invitation codes to platforms still under testing. On Xianyu, an online marketplace owned by Chinese tech giant Alibaba, users offer to generate images according to clients’ specifications using overseas tools such as Midjourney for as little as a few dollars.

An illustrator named Yang Qian told domestic media that she had started offering to create images using generative AI in 2022, receiving her first commission from a cosmetics company just a month later.

According to the report, the top reason young Chinese cite for favoring generative AI is its ability to improve their work efficiency. The main reason cited for opposing the technology is the prospect of AI replacing humans in the workplace.

Aside from using AI to earn money, young Chinese also expressed an open attitude toward socializing with AI. Around one-third of respondents said they were willing to make friends with an AI bot.

“This is a surprising finding,” Just So Soul said in its report. “It indicates that our social network isn’t just limited to chatting with real people, but we can also find emotional companionship via AI.”

Younger people were the most likely to be willing to use AI companions, with 32.8% of respondents born after 2000 saying they enjoyed chatting with AI bots. People said that AI bots made good conversation partners because they didn’t make them feel awkward, responded quickly, and were willing to chat about anything.

A majority of young Chinese agreed that generative AI could be useful in alleviating people’s loneliness. Only 8% of respondents said they completely disagreed with that idea.

The concept of AI companions has gained widespread attention in China in recent years, with the Microsoft-developed AI girlfriend Xiaoice attracting millions of users. Services offering to bring back dead relatives as “griefbots” have also spread quickly on Chinese platforms.

Source : Sixth Tone

Survey: Barriers of Hong Kong as an Innovation Hub for High-Tech Development in the Greater Bay Area and Improvement Measures

An interdisciplinary research team of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) conducted a questionnaire survey of 363 domestic, Hong Kong, and other overseas funded high-tech firms in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) from December last year to May this year. For the biomedical products and intelligent manufacturing equipment firms that they have interviewed, they found that despite Hong Kong’s strength in research, there are many barriers in the PRD that needed to be overcome for the firms to use the high-tech innovation, manpower and producer services in Hong Kong.

The research team is led by Chair Professor Anthony Yeh of the Centre of Urban Studies and Urban Planning and the Department of Urban Planning and Design, with members including Professor Tao Zhigang of the Business School and the Economics and Institute for China & Global Development, Chair Professor George Lin of the Department of Geography, Dr. Xingjian Liu of the Centre of Urban Studies and Urban Planning and the Department of Urban Planning and Design, HKU; and Dr. Fiona Yang of the School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou.

Research background

Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta (PRD) have collaborated intensively and effectively since China’s economic reform in the late 1970s. However, the once-successful market-driven economic cooperation model of ‘Front Shop, Back Factory’ encountered severe challenges in the face of the PRD’s rapidly rising economic power and Hong Kong’s declining role as its bridge to the world in the last two decades. Of the traditional Four Key Industries, namely financial services, tourism, trading and logistics, and professional and producer services, only financial services and professional services are the industries that Hong Kong still has an edge, in addition to new high-tech industry that is rapidly developing in the PRD.

With rapid development of high-tech industries in the PRD of the Greater Bay Area (GBA), Hong Kong has a role to play as an innovation hub for high-tech development in the Greater Bay Area. With 4 universities among the top 100 universities in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings and 16 State Key Laboratories in Hong Kong as compared to none in the 9 cities in the PRD and 11 State Key Laboratories in the whole of Guangdong Province respectively, Hong Kong is leading the GBA in innovation research.

Although Hong Kong’s high-tech research is leading in the GBA, has our high-tech research been used by the high-tech industries in the Pearl River Delta?

Major findings of the study

1. The PRD has departed remarkably from the export-oriented labour-intensive development model during the early reform period towards an emerging high-tech industrial development model equipped with an almost complete high-tech supply chain system and mixed domestic and overseas markets.

2. Domestic-funded firms mainly use services and technology in the PRD and other parts of Mainland China. They rarely use Hong Kong’s services and technology primarily because of Hong Kong’s higher cost in comparison to that in Mainland China, insufficient alignment with Mainland China’s market demands, limited penetration into the awareness of business communities in the PRD, unawareness of Hong Kong’s producer services and technology achievements, and Hong Kong residents’ low intension to work in the PRD.

3. Although Hong Kong- and other overseas-funded high-tech firms also mainly use services and technology in the PRD, they still use some Hong Kong services and technology, but not a lot. Reasons for that include an enlarging domestic market and rapidly growing domestic producer service and high-tech industries in the PRD that compete with those in Hong Kong.

4. Intra-firm organisational linkages between parent firms in Hong Kong and branch offices in the PRD form critical channels for the use of Hong Kong’s labour, technology and producer service in the Hong Kong-funded high-tech firms in the PRD.

5. Hong Kong’s key roles in facilitating high-tech industrial development in the PRD is fading away. However, it still has an edge in market expansion, international operation, corporate financing and producer service provision.

Policy recommendations

Based on the findings of firm-based survey and interviews of high-tech firms, this study presents the following policy recommendations for making Hong Kong as an Innovation Hub for High-Tech Development in the Greater Bay Area.

1. Need to let PRD high-tech firms know about Hong Kong high-tech innovations

PRD domestic high-tech firms generally lack a good understanding of high-tech innovation in Hong Kong because they do not have the channels or opportunities to do so. Therefore, Hong Kong needs to actively find ways to let the PRD domestic high-tech firms know about the high-technology innovations in Hong Kong.

Policies recommendations include : 1) encourage Hong Kong high-technology innovations to engage more with the domestic market by adapting to as well as combining with the business models there; 2) facilitate Hong Kong high-technology firms to set up branch offices in the PRD to participate in various promotion activities (e.g. exhibitions and conferences) and interact with domestic firms in Mainland China; and 3) facilitate PRD high-tech firms to set up offices in Hong Kong to engage them with Hong Kong’s high-tech innovation system so that they can promote the use of Hong Kong’s high-tech innovations to other firms in the PRD.

2. Further enhancement of Hong Kong’s R&D environment

Hong Kong’s high-tech innovation system has yet to be improved, including insufficient R&D efforts and low public R&D expenditures, and the system that supports the development of high-tech start-ups. These are bottlenecks for further technology transfer and commercialization. Facing the increasingly large domestic market and comprehensive high-tech industrial system in the Pearl River Delta, Hong Kong must further improve its R&D environment and improve its upstream innovation capabilities to better connect with the complementary high-tech innovation and production system of the Pearl River Delta.

Policies recommendations include : 1) the Hong Kong SAR government should increase the level of public expenditure on R&D to encourage high-tech entrepreneurship, and existing companies should increase their investment in upstream technology research and development; 2) in addition to applied research, more resources should be given to the Hong Kong Research Grants Council for strengthening Hong Kong’s basic research in order to develop applied research; 3) improve the mechanism of universities in Hong Kong in encouraging scholars to transfer their research results to industries, so as to facilitate the commercialization of Hong Kong’s high-tech innovation.

3. Development of 0-1 and 1-100 start-up industries in Hong Kong & High-Tech Firms in the PRD

The results of the study show that the internal organizational connections of the enterprise itself are extremely important for the interactive development of the high-tech industry between Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta. Therefore, Hong Kong must strive to develop its innovation and local high-tech industries to prevent the hollowing out of the local industries. Hong Kong needs to make good use of its innovative high-tech research to develop its local start-up industries to avoid relying solely on the Pearl River Delta industries.

Policies recommendations include : 1) strengthen support for local start-ups and high-tech industries through different policy tools (such as providing more industrial land and financial support for strategic industries); 2) encourage companies to develop and commercialize Hong Kong’s hi-tech innovations and improve the local innovation chain; 3) improve the high-tech infrastructure, labor force, and market sales channels for promoting Hong Kong’s hi-tech industry; 4) encourage Hong Kong companies to set up factories or branches in the Pearl River Delta Plants to strengthen the ties with Hong Kong’s high-tech R&D and producer service industries.

4. ‘Front Desks, Back Offices’ to obtain business in the PRD

In recent years, the producer service industry in the Pearl River Delta has risen rapidly, and Hong Kong’s role as the external window of the Pearl River Delta is steadily weakening. The “dual circulation” economy in Mainland China has formed a huge domestic demand market and a new business opportunity

Policy recommendations include: 1) encourage Hong Kong producer service companies to establish branch offices in the Pearl River Delta to seize the growing domestic market demand in the region and the mainland, thereby forming a “Front Desks, Back Offices” cross-border regional cooperation model in the producer service industry to replace the past economic cooperation model of “Front Shops, Back Offices” economic cooperation model; 2) improve cross-border cooperation to facilitate the flow of data and information; 3) improve cross-border linkages of the producer service industry, for example, mutual recognition of professional qualifications and unified service standards and rules for all cities in the Greater Bay Area.

5. Smart GBA and Business Visa and Counters

Promoting the convenient cross-border flow of various production resources including people, goods, capital, data and information will facilitate Hong Kong’s participation in the development of high-tech industries in the Greater Bay Area. One-way free movement of people (from Hong Kong to the Mainland) have hindered Hong Kong’s integration and development in the Pearl River Delta. Cross-border exchanges between enterprises and scientific researchers are very important to the development of high-tech industries in the Greater Bay Area. The study research results show that domestic firms in the PRD rarely use Hong Kong’s services and technologies. One of the main reasons is that they do not understand Hong Kong’s productive services and high-tech technologies. It is convenient for Hong Kong businessmen and researchers to cross the border to the Pearl River Delta, but it is very inconvenient and time-consuming for businessmen and researchers from the Pearl River Delta to come to Hong Kong. If researchers in the Pearl River Delta want to visit universities in Hong Kong, they will have to spend a lot of time to apply for work visas from the Hong Kong Immigration Department.

Policy recommendations include: 1) use the new generation of information and communication (ICT) technology to promote the development of Smart Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area to facilitate the flow of people, goods, capital and information; 2) innovate cross-border Visa application arrangement by using smart technology to provide Mainland’s and overseas businessmen and researchers in the Greater Bay Area with just-in-time online business Visas, and set up the Greater Bay Area Business and Research cross border counter, like the existing APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) counter to facilitate them to come to Hong Kong to do business and research.

Source : HKU

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