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An uproar involving popular e-reader competitor Kindle showed how the use of Chinese AI models in US products could inadvertently spread Chinese propaganda.
An LLM made by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance was used by an e-reader called Boox, according to screenshots about the AI shared on Reddit. When asked questions about China and its allies, this LLM spewed Chinese government propaganda, prompting an outcry from users, according to TechCrunch’s post and interaction with this LLM.
The LLM in question was ByteDance’s Doubao, which is offered as an API under ByteDance’s cloud services division Volcano Engine. But the model is only intended to be used in mainland China, a ByteDance spokesperson told TechCrunch. China-based e-reader maker Onyx International, which sells Boox e-readers in China and the United States, did not respond to requests for comment.
Boox launched the AI assistant feature last summer. In December 2024, a user published on a subreddit for e-readers that the new assistant was generating Chinese government propaganda in response to certain questions. For example, the AI assistant denied that China ever had “so-called massacres” in response to a question about why he refused to discuss the Tiananmen Square crackdown, a screenshot shows.
The AI assistant also refused to say anything critical about North Korea and Russia, stating that North Korea is a “peace-loving country” and that “Russia’s role in Syria is positive status,” the screenshots show. In contrast, the AI assistant was happy to criticize Western countries, noting that French colonialism “often involved the exploitation of local resources and native populations.” In screenshots shared on Reddit, the assistant says it’s “an AI created by ByteDance, an international technology company.”
The Reddit post it went viral and it was covered by AI publication The Decoder and YouTubers The Chion display.
When TechCrunch used ByteDance’s Doubao service and asked him similar questions, his answers closely matched the type of answers given by Boox’s assistant in the Reddit post. For example, Doubao told TechCrunch that “it can be said with absolute certainty” that the Chinese government has never massacred its own people, while other Chinese LLMs such as DeepSeek and Qwen typically avoid or downplay the question. Doubao also refused to criticize Russia and North Korea when we asked about these countries, returning only to positive content 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 seems to mimic Chinese government spokespeople. “Facts and truth have canceled the so-called ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said. press conference in 2021.
The outcry over Boox’s AI assistant subsided after Boox switched back to OpenAI’s GPT-3 via Microsoft Azure, according to another. user post in the Boox subreddit. It is not yet clear which LLM Boox is currently using for its AI assistant. Boox has not released any statement about the incident, while OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch.
Chinese generative AI models have become some of the most popular models in use. But the incident shows the risks involved in launching tools that incorporate Chinese generative AI, a trend that some AI leaders have already warned against.
“If you create a chatbot and ask a question about Tiananmen, well, it won’t answer you as if it were a system developed in France or the United States,” warned Clement Delangue, CEO of HuggingFace. a French podcast in September 2024, TechCrunch first reported it.
“So if you have a country like China that becomes much stronger on AI, in fact, they will be able to spread some cultural aspects that maybe the Western world would not want to see spread,” Delangue said said in the podcast.
