The riddle of whether Beijing-based ByteDance, TikTok’s corporate dad, is or is not hip-deep in compliance with the Chinese government’s censorship and propaganda mandates is a few light years closer to a solution thanks to the latest indignity suffered by Winnie the Pooh, the beloved but downtrodden cultural icon (“Chinese ebook reader Boox ditches GPT for state-censored China LLM pushing propaganda,” the decoder, December 26, 2024).
Onyx International, based in China, is an e-ink tablet company. It produces various Onyx Boox or BOOX e-readers and/or e-ink notetaking tablets in competition with such companies as Ratta (also based in China), which makes the Supernote; reMarkable, which makes the reMarkable; and Amazon, which makes the Kindle Scribe. (I own a Scribe and a Supernote A5X, both fine devices. Neither has AI babblers.)
The decoder reports:
Boox recently switched its AI assistant from Microsoft Azure GPT-3 to a language model created by ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, according to findings shared by Reddit user HIVVIH.
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.
HIVVIH says: “We shouldn’t accept devices delivered with such models in the West.”
The official r/Onyx_Boox subreddit apparently removed the post that first reported the AI censorship. According to HIVVIH: “It was the top post of the year by far too…. Glad I posted this on external subreddits.” The copy of the post quoted by the decoder appeared on the r/ereader subreddit.
Exactly how guilty Onyx International is in all this is hard to know offhand. Did the company voluntarily switch its AI babbler from the Microsoft model to the Chinese Communist Party–enslaved ByteDance model? Or was Onyx compelled to do so by the Party, which does not take no for an answer? Or what?
