During this year's National People's Congress sessions, Zhong Zheng, a National People's Congress deputy and Chief Financial Officer of Midea Group, put forward recommendations to strengthen the management of AI-powered digital avatar livestreams and improve the online marketing environment.
Zhong Zheng highlighted that as artificial intelligence increasingly integrates with the real economy, new business models and formats continue to emerge. AI digital avatars, as a significant application of AI technology, are now widely used in brand promotion, marketing, online education, and cultural dissemination, becoming a new force driving consumption upgrades and market expansion. However, as the barriers to producing and operating AI avatars lower, their misuse and non-compliance in livestreaming have grown, revealing issues such as fake identities, inappropriate content, rights disputes, and lagging regulation. Without timely intervention, these problems could disrupt market order, harm user rights, and undermine public trust in AI technology.
Zhong Zheng proposed three key recommendations:
First, improve laws and regulations to strengthen digital avatar identity authentication and accountability tracking. She suggested accelerating the legislative process for AI-related laws and establishing specific management clauses for AI avatar livestreams. Implementing a registration and filing system for digital avatars would mandate the disclosure of their AI-generated nature and the entities behind them, ensuring that digital identities are identifiable and responsible parties traceable. Revisions to the Consumer Rights Protection Law and Advertising Law should explicitly include digital avatar livestreams under regulatory oversight, with strict penalties for deceptive practices such as false advertising and celebrity impersonation. Additionally, intellectual property and personal rights laws should be updated to define the boundaries for authorizing the use of real individuals' likenesses, voices, and personal information in AI avatar creation, with increased penalties for unauthorized use.
Second, enhance technical capabilities to build a real-time, efficient content review system. Encouraging greater investment in AI content safety technology, particularly in real-time multimodal content recognition and risk early warning, is essential. An integrated review mechanism combining real-time AI monitoring, immediate human verification, and public opinion emergency response should be established. Strengthened monitoring for key sectors and peak livestreaming hours, along with immediate handling mechanisms for non-compliant broadcasts, would improve regulatory responsiveness and accuracy.
Third, clarify responsibilities across multiple parties and enhance cross-departmental coordination and public supervision. Businesses, platforms, and AI tool providers should be urged to fulfill their respective responsibilities, with clear obligations for content review, compliance labeling, and rights protection. User reporting channels should be streamlined to encourage public oversight. Establishing a regular collaborative regulatory mechanism among departments such as cyberspace administration, broadcasting, and market supervision would unify rules, enable data sharing, and facilitate joint enforcement.
Regarding the purification of the online marketing environment, Zhong Zheng pointed out that while the digital economy is booming and online marketing has become a core strategy for market expansion and brand building, the landscape is plagued by misconduct. Traditional违规营销 and technology-enabled malicious marketing intertwine, infringing on the rights of consumers and compliant businesses, disrupting fair competition, and polluting the online ecosystem. Particularly alarming is the misuse of technologies like AI-generated content and generative engine optimization for data pollution, false marketing, and black public relations, which distort market signals, mislead consumers, and hinder high-quality industry development.
Zhong Zheng recommended continuously refining laws and regulations to define the legal boundaries of违规营销. For instance, amending the Anti-Unfair Competition Law to explicitly classify the use of AIGC and GEO for data pollution, false advertising, and commercial defamation as unfair competition, with tiered penalties and potential criminal liability for severe cases. Clear responsibilities should be assigned to businesses, platforms, and technical service providers: businesses are accountable for the authenticity of AI-generated content they publish; platforms must actively monitor and address GEO-fed content; and GEO service providers should not offer algorithmic support for malicious competition.
Furthermore, platform accountability should be strengthened by developing intelligent review and closed-loop governance mechanisms. Major e-commerce and social platforms should be urged to create specialized AI content recognition models for business marketing, improving the automatic detection of fake reviews, parameter tampering, and malicious comparisons. A "one-time evidence submission, platform-wide interception" mechanism should be implemented: upon submitting valid evidence, platforms must complete the排查 and removal of similar content and同源 GEO information across the site within 24 hours, adding them to a negative sample database for long-term blocking.
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