Usually, they only censor the explicit content. But this is the first time that AI tools were used to directly alter the content of the original film.

By the way, the film has been withdrawn from a wide release in China after receiving too many complaints.

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[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

What they appear to be saying, which you aren't addressing in this reply, is that this is the fault of a Chinese company and not the CPC directly, while the headline clearly implies that it's the fault of the CPC in a more direct sense, like they ordered this.

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 13 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

The censorship itself is a process.

If the semantic argument here is that the censorship bureau doesn’t do all the cutting by itself, then technically the government doesn’t censor anything at all. The government simply tells you what is and not acceptable. The party that submits the product for licensing and approval has to do all the alterations.

As I mentioned, there are only two film companies that are allowed to handle imported films, and have done so for at least two decades importing hundreds of foreign films over the years. So these people know what they’re doing. The ridiculous part here is how they thought it would be a good idea to buy the film distribution rights and use AI tool to alter the contents to get around the issue. People aren’t buying it this time lol.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I'm not saying that the bureau is not censoring something by preventing it from being screened in X form due to content, obviously that is censorship and I'm sure you could produce for me an endless list of things that they are absolutely to blame for censoring in a targeted manner on socially reactionary grounds. I guess I would say that it's semantically true that the headline is misleading in that it makes it sound like the CPC is responsible in a direct manner for AI being used to make the couple het, but that's not what I was talking about.

What I mean is that, while a number of the scenes being removed is commonplace, and sometimes there are other revisions like the one people made fun of at the end of Fight Club (which I think was clumsy but not a bad change, especially given that it was more faithful to the book!), something like this is anomalous -- which is why it's such a news story to begin with -- and it's not clear with the given information if it's because of the bureau blocking the film beyond the expected degree or because some shithead executive got a great idea for using AI to "streamline" their editing process to minimize back-and-forth with the bureau or something.

I'm of course glad that it has received some degree of popular pushback, because this shouldn't be tolerated in either case.