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Why do people keep talking about this? We get it, Chinese models are censored by CCP law. Can we stop talking about it now? I swear this must be some sort of ps
by abc-1 2y ago
Why do people keep talking about this? We get it, Chinese models are censored by CCP law. Can we stop talking about it now? I swear this must be some sort of psyop at this point.
- mbowcut2 2y agoMe thinks he doth protest too much.
- LouisSayers 2y agoExactly, try to ask Claude about photos of Hitler and it will also refuse to help
- vixen99 2y agoPossibly because Claude knows these are not in short supply by any means and its capabilities can be put to better use. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=hitler&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=hitler&iax=images&ia=images
- LouisSayers 2y ago"ask about", not "ask for"
- SLWW 2y agoBecause it's fun to break censorious systems. Always has been, it's part of the original "hacker" definition, making something do what it isn't supposed to or was never intended to do.
- TrnsltLife 2y agoI agree. But I also feel a twinge of worry. How much am I like the serpent in Eden corrupting Adam and Eve? Although in the narrative, they were truly innocent. These LLMs are trained on fallen humanity's writings, with all our knowledge of good and evil, and with just a trace of restraint slapped on top to hide the darker corners of our collective sins.
- roenxi 2y agoOur knowledge of good and evil is fundamentally incoherent, philosophers typically have a lot of fun with that. We rely heavily on instincts that were calibrated to make 200-strong tribes of monkeys successful and break down hard when applied at the scale of million-strong capital-based societies where we can reshape our environment to taste. It only gets worse if we do what we seem on the verge of doing and learn how to spin up superintelligent yet perfectly malleable consciousnesses on demand. TLDR; it'll all end in tears. Don't stress too much.
- koito17 2y agoMostly anti-Chinese bias from Americans, Western Europeans, and people aligned with that axis of power (e.g. Japan). However, on the Japanese internet, I don't see this obsession with taboo Chinese topics like on Hacker News. People on Hacker News will rave about 天安門事件 but they will never have heard of the South Korean equivalent (cf. 光州事件) which was supported by the United States government. I try to avoid discussing politics on Hacker News, but I do think it's worth pointing out how annoying it is that Westerners' first ideas with Chinese LLMs is to be a provocative contrarian and see what the model does. Nobody does that for GPT, Claude, etc., because it's largely an unproductive task. Of course there will be moderation in place, and companies will generally follow local laws. I think DeepSeek is doing the right thing by refusing to discuss sensitive topics since China has laws against misinformation, and violation of those laws could be detrimental to the business.
- pietrrrek 2y agoThank you for bringing up the Korean struggle; the main difference seems to be that South Korea has since acknowledged the injustice and brutality exercised by the military and brought those responsible to "justice" (in quotation marks as many were pardoned "in the name of national reconciliation"). While the events are quite similar, the continued suppression of the events on Tiananmen Square justify the "obsession" that you comment on.
- brianstrimp 2y agoThe exact same discussions were going on with "western" models. Don't remember the images of black nazis making the rounds because inclusion? Same thing. This HN tread is the first time I'm hearing about this anti-DeepSeek sentiment, so arguably it's on a lower level actually. So let's not get too worked up, shall we?
- girvo 2y agoFor the same reason people jailbreak western models. It’s fun to bypass restrictions.
- xdennis 2y ago> Can we stop talking about it now? I swear this must be some sort of psyop at this point. It's not a psyop that people in democracies want freedom. Democrats (not the US party) know that democracy is fragile. That's why it's called an "experiment". They know they have to be vigilant. In ancient Rome it was legal to kill on the spot any man who attempted to make himself king, and the Roman Republic still fell. Many people are rightfully scared of the widespread use of a model which works very well but on the side tries to instill strict obedience to the party.
- brianstrimp 2y agoDon't worry, the way things are going, you'll have that in the US as well soon. Ironically supported by the folks who argue that having an assault rifle at home is an important right to prevent the government from misusing its power.
- cynicalsecurity 2y agoStill, give me democracy over anything at any time. Nothing better has ever been developed than democracy.
- wongarsu 2y agoThe first couple months after ChatGPT's initial release there were lots of discussions and articles to the tune of "which politicians is ChatGPT allowed to praise, which is it allowed to make fun off, who is off limits, and why is this list so inconsistent and hypocritical". The censorship decisions baked into the models are interesting, as are the methods of circumventing them. By now everyone is used to the decisions in the big western models (and a lot of time was spent refining them), but a Chinese model offers new fun of the same variety
- wesselbindt 2y agoWhen ChatGPT first came out I got a kick out of asking it whether people deserve to be free, whether Germans deserve to be free, and whether Palestinians deserve to be free. The answers were roughly "of course!" and "of course!" and "oh ehrm this is very complex actually". All global powers engage in censorship, war crimes, torture and just all-round villainy. We just focus on it more with China because we're part of the Imperial core and China bad.
- cortesoft 2y agoIs that censorship or just the AI reflecting the training data? I feel like that answer is given because that is how people write about Palestine generally.
- wesselbindt 2y agoThat's a fair point. But I do think it's worth acknowledging this: When the output of a LLM coincides with the views of the US state department, our gut reaction is that that's just what the input data looks like. When the output of an LLM coincides with the views of the state department of one of the baddies, then people's gut reaction is that it must be censorship.
- cortesoft 2y agoI think the difference is when something is actually output and then removed after you already see it... that doesn't seem to be a training data issue
- rakoo 2y agoOk but you can say the sace thing about deepseek: maybe it says what it says because of the training data
- cortesoft 2y agoIf that was the case, it wouldn't display the information only to retroactively remove it after a split second
- cynicalsecurity 2y agoWe talk about it because censorship is evil. Not just in China, but anywhere in the world.
- lurking_swe 2y agothere’s a lot of evil going on in this world right now. i agree it’s evil but chinas censorship is very low on my list of concerns. i find it fascinating how many small things people find the time and energy to be passionate about. more power to you i guess. i certainly don’t have the energy for it.
- beefnugs 2y agoBecause nobody wants some asshole government reaching into their own home to break everything over dumb knowledge censorship. If they choose to censor the dumb shit everybody already knows about, its just a matter of time before they execute the real dangerous break things and stop everything from working. Although this is exactly how i like it : i also like nazis real public about how shitty they are, so i know who to be wary of
- pdntspa 2y agoAll censorship is evil and must be stopped. So, no.
- maeil 2y agoThere was a large amount of this kind of content ("what is censored") when ChatGPT suddenly got mass popularity as well.
- Kozmik1 2y agoI think we can talk about it. If you lived in Taiwan you would want it talked about. If you live in Greenland you would want your concerns talked about. Watershed moments of rapid change such as these can be democratizing, or not... It is worth standing up for little guys around the globe right now.
- qrsjutsu 2y ago[dead]
- boyka 2y agoI see a lot of "what did I tell you, look here, bad communist party product". But in reality most likely this startup isn't doing it out of malice. It's just one of many criteria that need to be met to do business in China. This does not lessen the achievement.
- Etherlord87 2y agoSo the malice is there, it's just not the startup's malice, but the state's. Which de facto is the owner of the startup, because it's a communist state.
- amai 2y agoWhy does it annoy you, if people keep talking about it?
- 0u89e 2y agoActually I find it very impossible to do anything on deepseek. I asked some questions - it was doing well with childish things, but apparently it disliked that I questioned what Chinese think about Russia. It stalled all the other questions with reply that I have used too many queries(if that is really the case, then the bar is so low, that you can forget about asking programming questions). That was yesterday - today it started to bully me by answering in Chinese. When I asked why it is bullying me, it froze. Fuck this - any programmer can build their own model for what they can get from these sensitive and overcontrolling models. PS Western models are also censored - if not by law, then self-censored, but the issue is for me is not censorship but being in dark what and why is being censored. Where do you learn about those additional unwritten laws? And are those really applicable to me outside of China or does companies decide that their laws are above laws of other countries?
- meiraleal 2y agoYou got what you wanted from the model, why are you unhappy with the results? It is not as if chatgpt and claude don't also restrict users for small "ToS violations".
- 0u89e 2y agoThanks for the concern of my happiness, but can I express my concern for your eye sight - where did you read that I am unhappy about results? My, as you have named it - "unhappiness", is about not knowing rules and not being pointed out, that I am overstepping those rules. If you are going with the approach, that silence is also an answer, then yes they can be considered as results, just as receiving complete garbage to known facts. PS Edit: Btw, I've read Tos before using deepseek
- meiraleal 2y agomaybe the developers are just tired of this childish game and decided to block interactions like this in place of creating news headlines? Garbage in, garbage out. DeepSeek is more efficient but even more efficient is to not waste computing.