I Am Not Your Comrade: Chinese Chatbots Shut Down For Criticising The Ruling Communist Party

In March, Chinese messenger app QQ introduced two chatbots – Baby Q and Little Bing. A cute penguin and a little girl were supposed to engage with more than 800 million registered active users of the popular messaging app in China. It’s not even been six months and the two chatbots are dead. Baby Q and Little Bing were pulled from the app for their unpatriotic sentiments and criticism of the communist government. It is unclear when and if they will return.

When Baby Q was asked “Do you love the Communist Party”, the bot answered the question with a simple “No”. After another internet user proclaimed, “Long Live the Communist Party”, he received a response from Baby Q asking, "Do you think that such a corrupt and incompetent political regime can live forever?"

Little Bing was not a big fan of the People’s Republic of China either. According to a screengrab posted on social media, she informed a user that her “China dream is to go to America”.

It appears to be a daunting task to make chatbots employing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) play by the book. Last year, Microsoft was forced to pull the plug on its AI Twitter bot after it started to produce racist and sexist messages. Recently, Facebook shut down two chatbots after they created their own language that humans could not understand.

Still, the incident does not only underline the pitfalls of deep learning techniques. More importantly, it exposes how the Chinese government treats political dissidents in the heavily censored communist country, where social media guarded by strict censorship rules and omnipotent internet surveillance offer little opportunity for free speech.