Boox recently switched its AI assistant from Microsoft Azure GPT-3 to a language model created by ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.
[…]
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.
[…]
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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The discussions on this have kind of gone off the rails, so I’m locking this post. Please don’t sling insults at each other because you have a disagreement about what is or isn’t propaganda and stop being weirdly defensive of countries as a whole - none of them are a monolith, they are all ran by people.
An ebook reader doesn’t need LLM on it GPT or not
Boox are a GPL violator and refuse to share source they are legally obligated to. They can get the fuck out of here.
As far as I can tell they’ve still not released the source code (correct me if I’m wrong) so everyone should stay away from them.
Most buyers couldn’t tell you what source code is to save their own lives, so that’s easier said than done.
All LLMs have propaganda baked in to them.
The difference is that it’s intentional here.
Try asking chat gpt how to arm an insurgent group to overthrow the government. Or get it to admit the usa is a democracy in name only.
The difference is that we don’t see propaganda for what it is when it’s just “common sense” or the values being propagandised to us are ones we agree with. There are explicit censors in chat gpt.
There is a difference between censorship and propaganda. We were talking about the latter.
There is also a difference between government-mandated censorship and self-censorship. ChatGPT is almost exclusively doing the latter in order to avoid civil lawsuits, not the government busting down the doors. That’s obviously not even remotely the same as a Chinese LLM cracking down on Winnie the Pooh, because the God Emperor has a fragile ego.
Then there is the whole matter of training material. You won’t get most LLMs - including entirely open source ones with no commercial interest behind them - to spout your fringe political opinions as facts, because there is very little training material out there that agrees with you (or talks about how to launch an armed resistance - how many books and websites do you think exist on this topic?). A flawed democracy is still a democracy - and no serious scholar on this topic will call the US anything but that or variations of the term. Whether or not this remains the case after another four years of Trump is an entirely different matter. It’s not unlikely that the country becomes a hybrid regime like Hungary or worse, but an LLM that has difficulties with answering two questions about the past or present without hallucinating once can’t look into the future.
What annoys me the most about your comment is not that nearly everything about it is factually wrong, but that it’s nothing but whatsboutism, an attempt at defending what the Chinese regime is doing. That’s not a good look.
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.
That’s a distinction without a difference.
Try making that argument in a court of law. No, intent matters.
Are we in a court?
Please don’t be deliberately obtuse. You can do better than that.
In case it was unclear, the training material of most LLMs will almost inevitably include propaganda. If that propaganda is not deliberately added to the data, then that’s unintentional, a byproduct of poor vetting at worst. That’s obviously fundamentally different from an LLM being both deliberately trained with propaganda and having hard checks built into it that filter out certain keywords the government doesn’t want citizens to inform themselves about, which is what China is doing. You can’t honestly believe that the two are the same.
In what way is it meaningfully different? Does the intent of the creators of an LLM – a kind of system notorious for being a black box – fundamentally change the outcomes of what it says? It’s spouting propaganda either way.
Please don’t be deliberately obtuse. You can do better than that.
Condescending attitude aside, don’t bring up an irrelevant scenario if you don’t want me to point out its irrelevance.
When users tried to bring attention to the censorship on Boox’s Reddit forum, their posts were removed.
Fuck spez
?
How is that his fault?
Boox mods are the ones moderating the sub.
Enabler.
I’m all in on shitting on that loser but the whole concept of Reddit is to outsource the bulk of moderation to the users. Same goes for Lemmy & variants btw, with all the problems it comes with.
Not sure how the post relates to spez personally and I agree with you, but I don’t think anyone needs a reason to say “fuck spez.”
Fuck spez.
“Winnie the Pooh” - a term that’s banned in China because it’s used to mock President Xi Jinping.
What a weak snowflake. A confident and capable leader doesn’t fear opposition.
Why would you ever need a LLM on an eBook reader? Do you just let it summarize your books so you don’t have to read them?
I’ve done this to give myself something akin to Cliff’s Notes, to review each chapter after I read it. I find it extremely useful, particularly for more difficult reads. Reading philosophy texts that were written a hundred years ago and haphazardly translated 75 years ago can be a challenge.
That said, I have not tried to build this directly into my ereader and I haven’t used Boox’s specific service. But the concept has clear and tested value.
I would be interested to see how it summarizes historical texts about these topics. I don’t need facts (much less opinions) baked into the LLM. Facts should come from the user-provided source material alone. Anything else would severely hamper its usefulness.
Reading philosophy texts that were written a hundred years ago and haphazardly translated 75 years ago can be a challenge.
For a human, at that. I get that you feel it works for you, but personally, I would trust an LLM to understand it (insofar as that’s a thing they can do at all) even less.
I get that, and it’s good to be cautious. You certainly need to be careful with what you take from it. For my use cases, I don’t rely on “reasoning” or “knowledge” in the LLM, because they’re very bad at that. But they’re very good at processing grammar and syntax and they have excellent vocabularies.
Instead of thinking of it as a person, I think of it as the world’s greatest rubber duck.
I’m not sure if this is how @hersh@literature.cafe is using it, but I could totally see myself using an LLM to check my own understanding like the following:
- Read a chapter
- Read the LLM’s summary of the chapter
- Make sure I can understand and agree or disagree with each part of the LLM’s summary.
Ironically, this exercise works better if the LLM “hallucinates”; noticing a hallucination in its summary is a decent metric for my own understanding of the chapter.
That’s pretty much what I do, yeah. On my computer or phone, I split an epub into individual text files for each chapter using
pandoc(or similar tools). Then after I read each chapter, I upload it into my summarizer, and perhaps ask some pointed questions.It’s important to use a tool that stays confined to the context of the provided file. My first test when trying such a tool is to ask it a general-knowledge question that’s not related to the file. The correct answer is something along the lines of “the text does not provide that information”, not an answer that it pulled out of thin air (whether it’s correct or not).
Ooooh, that’s a good first test / “sanity check” !
May I ask what you are using as a summarizer? I’ve played around with locally running models from huggingface, but never did any tuning nor straight-up training “from scratch”. My (paltry) experience with the HF models is that they’re incapable of staying confined to the given context.
I could see it useful if you need the LLM to explain something maybe? If you’re reading something in a language not native to your own, or just something that’s using quite complex language & writing, then it may be useful to just have a paragraph or sentence explained to you. Or maybe the book references something you’re not familiar with and can get a quick explanation by the LLM.
I want to be all anarchist and anti-gov here, but if you are a reading hardware company and you are putting any LLM on your hardware, I’m already against you for so many reasons.
Is everyone on beehaw just thoroughly bought in to anti-Chinese propaganda. Seems every post that makes my feed is more of this garbage. Should I send them the way of .world?
With how much hate I see about the US here, I could say the same thing there.
Calling out people for doing bad shit is kinda normal. It just so happens that China, Russia, and the US do a lot of bad shit, so they get called out a lot. If it bugs you, then just filter out posts by specific people or with specific keywords.
This has two issues with it that are sourced from the fact that most people here are likely from the States or similar. Namely:
- How are we supposed to do anything about China or Russia? It’s anger for its own sake.
- Criticism of the U.S. is unlikely to make Americans racist towards themselves. Sinophobia, meanwhile, is a real risk.
This aside, I personally am irritated by the quantity moreso than anything else. As I said elsewhere, it’s the same few users, and I find it obsessive. It stops sounding to me like “I want people to be aware of particular issues from China” and starts sounding to me like “I want to bombard people with all possible negativity about China until they hate everything related to the place as much as I do.”
Thanks to these folks, Beehaw virtually always has at least one post about China or Russia on its front page. Often several. Credit where it’s due; I’ve seen a pro-Palestine post here and there, which I appreciate. But Christ, I’m sick of the rest. Blocks are fair, but I feel like that just hides the issue rather than solving it. I feel like I’m seeing a propaganda mill in action, and I don’t like the idea of just ignoring it.
Sinophobia
The only people who claim that legitimate criticism of the Chinese government is “sinophobia” are 1) the Chinese government, 2) their trolls and 3) tankies.
I started there with .world but simple people clump together to make themselves feel ok and instances reach a point where they just aren’t worth it. It took Reddit years to do that it happens on lemmy instances rather quickly. Oh well. I don’t really care. I just can’t stand posts pumping nationalistic hate. Especially obvious propaganda.
So factual reporting about Chinese censorship is “anti-Chinese propaganda”? Are you really that thin-skinned about your favorite dictatorship?
Are you clear on how propaganda works?
God forbid there’s a left leaning instance that isn’t a Tankie infested cesspool.
By left leaning you mean liberal? I cook with all that, thanks…
It’s pretty weird and I noticed this too. And this news is like… a non issue? Choosing crap over shit is newsworthy only if you specify the nationality of the shit, which is fucked up
There’s 2-3 users who post about China/Russia to an extraordinary degree. I could mention them here, but for the sake of avoiding potential harassment (however unlikely) I’d rather not publicly single them out. Suffice to say if you spend a decent amount of time here you probably know who they are.
I find it obsessive and obnoxious at best. At worst, I start to wonder if there are more accounts doing it than there are people behind them.
deleted by creator
Feeling pretty good about not getting a Boox e-ink tablet now.
Ah man, they make great E-ink android tablets… Was just thinking of upgrading my Nova 3 to the new Note 4C. That’s a shame.
You can probably get around it with certain prompts, just practice on https://gandalf.lakera.ai/
I vaguely remember there being a FOSS OS you can put on Kobos, can you also do that on Boox?
Boox uses Android.
Yeah, kobo does too. I assumed it was a proprietary flavor which was pretty locked down, is that not the case?
My Kobo is Linux but not Android.
This page says the Boox bootloader is unlocked but the kernel source is missing: https://gist.github.com/fardjad/97baf36de97d1c4ae3953b3d359bb918
It’s as open as most Android brands. I don’t use any of Boox’s services or apps. I installed F-Droid and use open-source apps from there. I use Librera as my ebook reader, with Syncthing to sync my book library between my desktop, ereader, and phone. It’s possible to set up the Play Store but I don’t bother, personally.
It’s not a 100% smooth experience but I’m very happy with the F-Droid compatibility. I absolutely refuse to get locked into a walled garden.
Older Boox’s weren’t certified for the Play store, so you couldn’t run play store apps, but that hasn’t been true for a while. You can run pretty much any Android app (though many don’t work well on e-ink), and the older Boox’s run older Android versions that aren’t compatible with many apps in the Play store even if they can connect.
I think you’re referring to “koreader” which started life as alternative kobo e-reader firmware, but now has an android port, but it just runs as an android app, that’s what I run on my Boox Palma, but if it reboots, I have to relaunch koreader.
Tardigrada strikes again. What’s this, radio free asia lemmy branch? Lol
You know, if you wait a month, you’ll have articles to post on the US as well. Patience is a virtue.
