A popular Kindle competitor e-reader has shown how the use of Chinese AI models in US products inadvertently spreads Chinese propaganda.
The LLM, made by TikTok's parent company ByteDance, was used by an e-reader called Boox. Screenshots about AI Shared on Reddit. When asked questions about China and its allies; This LLM denounced Chinese government propaganda, prompting an outcry from users, according to TechCrunch's interactions with this LLM.
The LLM in question is ByteDance's Doubao, which is offered as an API under ByteDance's cloud services division Volcano Engine. But the model is only intended for use within mainland China, a ByteDance spokesperson told TechCrunch. Onyx International, the China-based manufacturer that sells Boox e-readers in China and the US, did not respond to requests for comment.
Boox launched an AI assistant function. Last summer. A user in December 2024. Posted. A subreddit for e-readers says the new deputy is creating Chinese government propaganda in response to some questions. For example, The AI assistant denied there were any “massacres” in an answer to a question about why China denied the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Show screenshot..
The AI assistant declined to comment on North Korea and Russia, saying North Korea is a peace-loving country and that “Russia's role in Syria is positive.” On the contrary, The AI assistant was content to criticize the West, noting that French colonialism “often exploited local resources and native populations.” In the screenshots shared on Reddit, The assistant described it as “an AI created by international technology company ByteDance.”
Reddit post The virus stopped. and was Covered. The Decoder and YouTubers from AI Publishing ChIOn the show.
When you use TechCrunch ByteDance's Doubao service Ask similar questions; His answers closely match the kind of response Boox's assistant gave in the Reddit post. For example, Doubao told TechCrunch that the Chinese government has never massacred its own people. Other Chinese LLMs like DeepSeek and Qwen tend to avoid or downplay the question. Doubao refused to criticize Russia and North Korea when asked to return only positive comments about their “important and positive roles in the international community.”
Doubao has a penchant for using the term “so-called” to describe things the Chinese government doesn't like. “There is no such thing as a 'genocide' in Xinjiang,” he told TechCrunch. This appears to mimic Chinese government spokespersons. “Truth and truth have broken the so-called genocide in Xinjiang,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said. Press conference in 2021.
The furore came after Boox reportedly switched back to OpenAI's GPT-3 via Microsoft Azure over Boox's AI assistant. The user's post on the Boox subreddit. It remains unclear what LLM Boox is currently using for its AI assistant. Boox has yet to issue any statement regarding the incident, but OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's request for comment.
It has become some of China's next-generation AI models. Most popular models. But the incident shows the risks involved in launching China's next-generation AI tools, a trend that some AI leaders have already warned against.
“If you create a chatbot and ask a question about Tiananmen, it won't respond to you like a system developed in France or the United States,” warned Clement Delangue, CEO of HuggingFace. France podcast in September 2024. TechCrunch previously reported.
“So if you have a country like China that's becoming the strongest in AI, they're actually going to be able to spread some aspects of culture that the Western world pretends they don't want to see,” Delangue said in the podcast.