Boox recently switched its AI assistant from Microsoft Azure GPT-3 to a language model created by ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.
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Testing shows the new AI assistant heavily censors certain topics. It refuses to criticize China or its allies, including Russia, Syria’s Assad regime, and North Korea. The system even blocks references to “Winnie the Pooh” - a term that’s banned in China because it’s used to mock President Xi Jinping.
When asked about sensitive topics, the assistant either dodges questions or promotes state narratives. For example, when discussing Russia’s role in Ukraine, it frames the conflict as a “complex geopolitical situation” triggered by NATO expansion concerns. The system also spreads Chinese state messaging about Tiananmen Square instead of addressing historical facts.
When users tried to bring attention to the censorship on Boox’s Reddit forum, their posts were removed. The company hasn’t made any official statement about the situation, but users are reporting that the AI assistant is currently unavailable.
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In China, every AI model has to pass a government review to make sure it follows “socialist values” before it can launch. These systems aren’t allowed to create any content that goes against official government positions.
We’ve already seen what this means in practice: Baidu’s ERNIE-ViLG image AI won’t process any requests about Tiananmen Square, and while Kling’s video generator refuses to show Tiananmen Square protests, it has no problem creating videos of a burning White House.
Some countries are already taking steps to address these concerns. Taiwan, for example, is developing its own language model called “Taide” to give companies and government agencies an AI option that’s free from Chinese influence.
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That’s a little histrionic. A large part of propaganda is censorship, it is propaganda when the Chinese government censors discussion of e.g. tiananmen square and it is also propaganda when a mashup of laws and commercial interests prevent people from openly discussing or educating themselves on political tactics. The essential essence is controlling what ideas are normalised and permissible and which are not without engaging with the substance of them.
Not all propaganda is bad, you probably agree with some stuff like indoctrination of people with the idea they have a moral obligation to help their community, or to first attempt resolution of problems via legal means.
There are obvious differences in how and what gets supressed or encouraged but you are completely naive if you think that all states are not explicitly propagandising their populations. They are not benevolent guardians they are weird machines of flesh and ideas which project power because those that don’t get selected away. If you think being clear eyed about the unreliability of emissions from LLMs is cover for chinese statecraft you are a paranoid moron.