Governments and businesses might benefit greatly from using technology to collect and analyze massive volumes of data in order to make more educated choices. However, other people worry that AI will be used to spy on people and limit their rights to privacy and freedom. We’ll look at China’s use of AI for espionage and what it may mean for the country.

Facial recognition technology is one example of how China is using AI for surveillance purposes. Chinese authorities have set up a massive network of surveillance cameras that employ face recognition software to monitor citizens’ whereabouts and actions in real time. This technology has been used to keep tabs on and restrict the activities of specific minority groups, such as the Uighurs in Xinjiang region, as well as to track down and imprison those who are considered to be a security risk.

Concerns have also been raised regarding China’s capacity to deploy artificial intelligence for covert kinds of influence and control. China, for instance, has been experimenting with AI-driven “social credit” systems, which compile information about an individual from several sources to get a score that supposedly represents that person’s reliability and social conduct. There is worry that this system, which has been used to reward and penalize individuals depending on their conduct, may be used to exercise control and influence in more covert ways.

This script is an example of how some governments use Python and the OpenCV library to implement a simple facial recognition app:

import cv2

# Load the Haar cascade for detecting faces
face_cascade = cv2.CascadeClassifier('haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml')

# Read the input image
image = cv2.imread('input.jpg')

# Convert the image to grayscale
gray = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)

# Detect faces in the image
faces = face_cascade.detectMultiScale(gray, 1.1, 4)

# Draw a rectangle around the faces
for (x, y, w, h) in faces:
    cv2.rectangle(image, (x, y), (x+w, y+h), (255, 0, 0), 2)

# Show the output image
cv2.imshow('Faces', image)
cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.destroyAllWindows()