TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Taiwan will create its own rival to ChatGPT and the Baidu AI chatbot that will produce output using traditional Chinese characters.

Creating an AI-powered chatbot that produces content written in traditional Chinese will prevent the rapidly growing tech space from being dominated by information that is biased, especially misinformation supporting China’s political interests, according to Minister of Science and Technology Wu Tsung-tsong (吳政忠).

Chinese company Baidu plans to release its own AI chatbot in March, and Wu said that in order to combat misinformation and biased information, it will be important to have a traditional Chinese language alternative that is trained on information without censorship.

“ChatGPT generally uses public information to generate responses, but the system can be tweaked manually so that it can generate specific responses to certain questions,” he told the Taipei Times. “Taiwan would create its own version of ChatGPT to avoid AI systems trained to provide biased information from dominating the industry.”

The Ministry of Science and Technology will allocate NT$34.9 billion (US$1.15 billion) for spending on new technologies, NT$11.9 billion of which will be used for developing the chatbot.

Simply training a chatbot on information free from direct censorship is often not enough to eliminate all bias, however. With the emergence of AI technologies, there have been multiple instances of chatbots and AI models producing biased, racist, sexist and other discriminatory outputs due to the nature of the information they are trained on.