{"id":234094,"date":"2026-01-15T05:44:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T05:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/234094\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T05:44:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T05:44:07","slug":"jailed-chinese-ai-chatbot-developers-appeal-in-landmark-pornography-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/234094\/","title":{"rendered":"Jailed Chinese AI chatbot developers appeal in landmark pornography case"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a landmark case in China, two <a target=\"_self\" class=\"e1yy41x40 ef9u0v01 css-1ankfgb ecgc78b0\" href=\"https:\/\/www.scmp.com\/topics\/artificial-intelligence?module=inline&amp;pgtype=article\" title=\"\" data-qa=\"BaseLink-renderAnchor-StyledAnchor\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">AI<\/a> chatbot developers have appealed against their convictions on pornography charges over software that generated sexual content for paid users.<\/p>\n<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">The Shanghai First Intermediate People\u2019s Court began on Wednesday hearing the appeal by the two defendants against an earlier decision by a lower court to sentence one of the developers to four years and the other to 1\u00bd years in prison for \u201ccreating pornographic material for profit\u201d.<\/p>\n<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">The hearing has been adjourned, pending expert opinions on the technology-related issues in the case, according to a defendant\u2019s lawyer.<\/p>\n<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">The developers, Wang and Li \u2013 not their real names \u2013 created an \u201cemotional companionship\u201d chatbot called AlienChat (AC) in 2023. In April 2024, they were detained by police after explicit content was found in the AI model\u2019s chat histories.<\/p>\n<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">By the time of their arrest, the chatbot had 116,000 registered users, of whom 24,000 were paid users, according to court documents seen by the South China Morning Post.<\/p>\n<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">The Xuhui District People\u2019s Court in Shanghai said a random sampling of 12,495 chats from 150 paid users revealed that 3,618 of these contained \u201cobscene material\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a landmark case in China, two AI chatbot developers have appealed against their convictions on pornography charges&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":234095,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[119876,365,40014,138712,363,364,607,123272,138710,111,139,69,3747,145,138711,27164,138709,138708],"class_list":["post-234094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ac","tag-ai","tag-ai-developers","tag-alienchat","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-china","tag-hainan-university","tag-li","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-shanghai","tag-technology","tag-the-beijing-news","tag-wang","tag-yingke-law-firm","tag-zhou-xiaoyang"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}