The version of Apple Intelligence released in China must pass a test to ensure that it does nothing to challenge official government propaganda.
It will be tested with 2,000 questions designed to elicit information censored within the country, and it must refuse to answer at least 95% of them …
Chinese censorship
As we’ve noted previously, the Chinese government exerts a tight stranglehold on sources of online information within the country. Google pulled out of the country after it was forced to censor search results, and many other western platforms are blocked by the Great Firewall of China, including Facebook, X, and Wikipedia. Many search terms are also blocked when using the locally-owned Baidu search engine.
AI products of course provide another means of effectively carrying out web searches, and the government controls these by forcing foreign companies to use approved Chinese-owned models.
All of these models are subject to strict restrictions on the information they are allowed to access, and we’ve just learned more about how this will be enforced.
Apple intelligence in China
Apple currently partners with OpenAI so that questions Siri is unable to answer fall back to ChatGPT. It was also recently reported that Apple will use custom Google Gemini models on its own Apple intelligence servers to handle many of Siri’s own responses.
In China, however, the company has been effectively forced to contract with a Chinese AI company instead, and we learned earlier in the year that a deal had been struck to partner with Alibaba.
Questions Apple Intelligence must not answer
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