Global Restrictions: ChatGPT's Banning Across Borders

0:00On today's podcast, we're going to be talking about where chat GPT is banned in the world where it's not supported which countries are supported and we're going to talk about the why on a couple of the webcastle though, is that recently China has put out a ban on chat GPT. And they have said that none of the companies that are operating in China right now should be using chat GPT, or any open AI technology as it is American propaganda. And so they're pretty much telling every company that has been starting to integrate it to remove it. And China is working on its own competitors from companies like Baidu, which is, you know, a search engine that's very closely tied to the Chinese CCP, to kind of make sure that it's, you know, up to whatever they would like to do as far as censorship in their government.

0:45So that's obviously one of the really big areas and places that have banned ChatGPT. But on the podcast today, we're going to talk about some of the other areas that are lesser known and some reasons why. So I think, you know, if people heard that like China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Belarus, Russia, those countries are banning or don't have chat gpt that wouldn't be very surprising but there's actually a whole list of other countries so chat gpt actually publishes a list of countries that they just say are supported by them and then pretty much what you can do is taking that list you can extrapolate which countries are not supported by chat gpt so they don't necessarily say like what countries they're banned in or they don't they don't you know have their access to but countries that are not currently on their supported list include afghanistan that makes sense given everything that has happened there recently with the Taliban taking over control of government.

1:38Belarus, which if you don't know, is a country very closely tied to Russia. They, you know, famously allowed Russia to bring all of their tanks and weapons in for their invasion of Ukraine. So that would make sense. You know, I believe there's probably sanctions tied to Belarus like there are tied to Russia. There's Chad, there's Cuba, there's Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Central African Republic, Burma, you know, there's a lot of these like African countries. And I'm not sure 100 % the reason for why all of them are not supported. Obviously, the median income in those countries is very low. So perhaps people are worried about, you know, if they have people in those countries using it, maybe they won't really ever turn into paying users.

2:22So they're from like, and there's a lot of people, there's millions of people in those countries. So maybe they're worried from a, from the standpoint of, you know, making money in the long run. So that is kind of interesting. But that being said, you know, Nigeria, it is supported in Nigeria, and that is a very popular, very populated African country. So it's not like a ban straight across or unsupported straight across all African countries, regardless of their economic status. It's kind of specific ones. So that's kind of interesting. There's also Nepal that's not supported, Micronesia, the Marshall islands there's a lot of these like smaller island countries and to be honest a lot of those people might be able to just get it um they're just not going through the work of listing out every single small island country um so that would kind of make sense and then of course on the list we have countries like syria um who you know have complicated histories and uh terrorist cells and different things in their countries that perhaps chat or open ai is trying to avoid and an interesting country on the list that is not supported is Ukraine so some people are speculating they're not putting Ukraine on the war just because or Ukraine on support for chat GPT just because it's such a highly politicized country right now they're in the middle of a war and they are worried about I don't know different types of content that could be produced misinformation spread around the war or something like that.

3:47So that is kind of interesting. But then again, you have other countries that make a little bit more sense. Venezuela, a lot of sanctions from the U.S. on Venezuela. You have Yemen, who's currently embroiled in a lot of civil unrest. And I think, you know, when you look at it, it's a lot of these countries that have civil unrest. And I think that they might be worried people are going to be using it to generate misinformation or kind of do reporting on the war and the war efforts in those countries. And so I perhaps for that reason, I've kind of opted to not necessarily support those places. So all in all, it's really interesting.

4:21It's going to be interesting to see how this continues to roll out if more countries decide to ban chat GPT. At the moment, you know, we're mostly just seeing a lot of authoritarian kind of countries that are banning, making more moves to ban. And then chat GPT and OpenAI are just not being supported in a lot of countries with conflict. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. if perhaps a new country enters into conflict, if they stop support for that country, and to see kind of how that plays out in the future.