According to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, change is under way not only in technical capability but also in public sentiment. In China, 72 per cent of people trust artificial intelligence (AI), compared to 32 per cent in the United States and 28 per cent in the United Kingdom. Similar patterns hold across India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand as developing Asian markets consistently outperform Western and developed peers on public trust in innovation.

I don’t believe this is because Chinese bazinga AI is inherently more trustworthy, currently the AIs are all more or less comparable, you’ll get a similar answer out of ChatGPT, Grok or DeepSeek on any given topic.

I think it is simply because it is inheriting trust created by the Chinese governing system. The AI in the rest of the world is inheriting distrust in the capitalist governing system.

Everyone can see how AI can be used to shape the truth. The Chinese population simply trusts that their government is going to carefully manage it to display the real truth and be positive towards the people, whereas the populations of the rest of the world believe that their governments can not be trusted to intentionally misuse it to harm themselves.

This is less about the technology itself and more about who is controlling the technology.