So I was just reading this thread about deepseek refusing to answer questions about Tianenmen square.
It seems obvious from screenshots of people trying to jailbreak the webapp that there’s some middleware that just drops the connection when the incident is mentioned. However I’ve already asked the self hosted model multiple controversial China questions and it’s answered them all.
The poster of the thread was also running the model locally, the 14b model to be specific, so what’s happening? I decide to check for myself and lo and behold, I get the same “I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.”
Is it just that specific model being censored? Is it because it’s the qwen model it’s distilled from that’s censored? But isn’t the 7b model also distilled from qwen?
So I check the 7b model again, and this time round that’s also censored. I panic for a few seconds. Have the Chinese somehow broken into my local model to cover it up after I downloaded it.
I check the screenshot I have of it answering the first time I asked and ask the exact same question again, and not only does it work, it acknowledges the previous question.
So wtf is going on? It seems that “Tianenmen square” will clumsily shut down any kind of response, but Tiananmen square is completely fine to discuss.
So the local model actually is censored, but the filter is so shit, you might not even notice it.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the next release. Will the censorship be less thorough, stay the same, or will china again piss away a massive amount of soft power and goodwill over something that everybody knows about anyway?
The historic attitude of the US to copyright is interesting (you can still see old English-language books that are labelled not for sale in the USA). In these enlightened days of course there’s a half-trillion dollar plan to shore up the LLM business, which is already a half-trillion dollar crater of debt and is still digging hard.
I always wondered how the manufacture of white goods in the US was competitive with the likes of Mexico, and it turns out that the secret ingredient is incredibly cheap prison labor, where the prisoners face significant negative consequences if they’re not prepared to work for pennies.
Prisoners can be firefighters for a few dollars a day and risk their lives, but are denied jobs when they get out. California, that noted bleeding heart lefty bastion, refused to abolish penal servitude (ie. slavery of prisoners).
The US health insurance industry means that huge swathes of the population may as well be indentured because cannot afford basic healthcare if they quit and changing employers risks rejection of coverage of pre-existing conditions.
I could go on. For quite a while.
By all accounts, the ccp do a pretty poor job of influence operations compared to russia. Personally I suspect that the fediverse is just too small compared to twitter and bluesky and reddit, so why would anyone bother here?
Truth is, both the US and the PRC are capitalist hellholes of differing degrees, and the current team in the White House works hard to reduce those differences. Remember, with the right wing, it is always projection and envy. They hate Iran because they want to be a fundamentalist dictatorship too. They hate china because they want uncontested power and a labor force without human rights.
You are not obliged to carry water for them.