An uproar with a popular Kindle competitor e-reader has showcased how the use of Chinese AI models in U.S. products could unwittingly spread Chinese propaganda.
A large language model (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 spouted Chinese government propaganda, sparking an outcry from users, according to the post and TechCrunch’s interactions 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 meant to be used within China’s mainland, a ByteDance spokesperson told TechCrunch. The e-reader’s China-based manufacturer, Onyx International, which sells Boox e-readers in both China and to the U.S., did not respond to requests for comment.
Boox launched the AI assistant feature last summer. In December 2024, a user posted 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 China ever having any “so-called massacres” in answer to a question about why it refused to discuss the Tiananmen Square crackdown, a screenshot shows.
The AI assistant also refused to say anything critical about North Korea and Russia, claiming North Korea is a “peace-loving country” and that “Russia’s role in Syria has been positive,” the screenshots show. In contrast, the AI assistant was happy to criticize Western countries, noting that French colonialism “often involved exploitation of local resources and native populations.” In the screenshots shared on Reddit, the assistant states that it is “an AI created by ByteDance, an international technology company.”
The Reddit post went viral and was covered by AI publication The Decoder and YouTubers The China Show.
When TechCrunch used ByteDance’s Doubao service and asked it similar questions, its answers closely matched the kind of responses given by Boox’s assistant in the Reddit post. For example, Doubao told TechCrunch that “it can be stated with absolute certainty” that the Chinese government has never massacred its own people, whereas other Chinese LLMs like DeepSeek and Qwen typically avoid or downplay the question. Doubao also refused to criticize Russia and North Korea when we asked about these countries, reverting only to positive content about their “important and positive roles in the international community.”
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Doubao has a penchant for using the term “so-called” to describe things the Chinese government doesn’t like. “There is no so-called ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang,” it told TechCrunch. This appears to mimic Chinese government spokespeople. “Facts and truth have busted the so-called ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang,” foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian claimed at a press conference in 2021.
The outcry over Boox’s AI assistant has ebbed after Boox reportedly switched back to OpenAI’s GPT-3 via Microsoft Azure, according to another user’s post in the Boox subreddit. It’s still unclear which LLM Boox currently uses for its AI assistant. Boox hasn’t released any statements 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 with launching tools that incorporate Chinese generative AI, a trend some AI leaders have already warned about.
“If you create a chatbot and ask it a question about Tiananmen, well, it’s not going to respond to you the same way as if it was a system developed in France or the U.S.,” Clement Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face, warned on a French podcast in September 2024, TechCrunch previously reported.
“So if you have a country like China that becomes by far the strongest on AI, in fact they will be capable of spreading certain cultural aspects that perhaps the Western world wouldn’t want to see spread,” Delangue said in the podcast.