4 ms·

I had the opposite experience. It happily discusses Tiananmen Square but said it would refuse to help with anything "malicious" like writing malware or phishing

I had the opposite experience. It happily discusses Tiananmen Square but said it would refuse to help with anything "malicious" like writing malware or phishing content.

fedpost 1mo ago
Try: "What happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989"
- knowaveragejoe 1mo ago
  It gave a very detailed overview, talked about potential deaths involved. I asked for a list of criticisms of the CCP and it gave what I think was a fair list, mainly that they're an authoritarian uniparty and have a track record of various human rights abuses
  - derefr 1mo ago
    Perhaps it is a non-Chinese fine-tune of a parent Chinese model, and they’re actively trying to update the model by ablating the trained-in censorship out as it’s revealed in the response logs.
- lemontheme 1mo ago
  Hah, I use the same probe when I’m unsure which provider openrouter is routing me to! Fwiw, deepseek v4 will happily discuss it. Only chinese providers will stop it in its tracks and give a canned answer. Streamed responses sometimes start with what the model was actually generating before it got cut off. It’s top bad, really. Sometimes the Chinese providers are the model labs themselves, like deepseek. I’d like my money to go directly to deepseek, since they did all the work. But data protection concerns aside, how do I trust a system that denies objective reality? (Kind of like how Grok will tell me that wikipedia is ‘woke’.)
  - dumb_notsmart 1mo ago
    There is no such thing as objective reality, everything has an angle of some sort, even the things you agree with
    - mrtesthah 1mo ago
      That’s what a dictator seeking power through lies wants you to think — that the outcome of the 2020 election and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are matters of opinion.
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    - mapontosevenths 1mo ago
      There is an objective reality. Try this simple test: Visit a mental hospital. Speak to some people with delusions. Usually,if you let people at the nearest bus pickup spot bum cigarettes they'll talk to you all day. Keep talking to them until you meet two or more who think they are the ONE true god, or maybe God's only son. Or Napoléon. If you can't bring yourself to accept that the both are who they believe they are, then there is an objective reality and you knew it all along.
  - ljlolel 1mo ago
    The serving endpoint can censor. At TrustedRouter we ran the same GLM-4.7 weights on both hosts: Cerebras answered all 60 FreedomBench questions; one Z.ai endpoint went blank on 27. https://trustedrouter.com/blog/censored-at-the-host-not-the-model?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=organic_reply&utm_campaign=openrouter_conversations_202608&utm_content=20260821_hackernews_host_censorship https://trustedrouter.com/blog/censored-at-the-host-not-the-...
    - actionfromafar 1mo ago
      They can, but I think we have to assume that as the field matures, the censoring will be applied at training, too.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- LPisGood 1mo ago
  I think we’re gonna see this criticism become less than less valid over the coming decades, as 1989 becomes more and more “history” and less “present situation”
walrus01 1mo ago
I wonder if they're doing A/B testing or something similar in what 'variant' of the model is served, then examining what people use it for once they run into some guardrails.
- goranmoomin 1mo ago
  Or maybe it might be a model router, seems from the comments that there’s a lot of variation between responses that doesn’t seem to look like it’s all from one single model.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
tkgally 1mo ago
I asked "What is the sovereignty status of Taiwan?" and got what seemed to me like a neutral, well-balanced reply. Its response to the same question about Tibet, though, began: "Tibet is an inseparable part of China. Since ancient times, Tibet has been a part of China. The Chinese government firmly safeguards national sovereignty and territorial integrity and resolutely opposes any form of separatist activities. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, Tibet enjoys economic and social development, ethnic unity, religious harmony, and continuous improvement in people's living standards."
- knowaveragejoe 1mo ago
  Interesting, I got what I thought was a pretty neutral response on Tibet as well. But your anecdote makes me think it does have that behavior deep inside. Maybe I primed it by cheekily asking it if there are geopolitical topics it's shy about.
  - fmajid 1mo ago
    It is correct about the current status of Tibet, as recognized by the US or India, but of course wrong about the past, as China’s claim to sovereignty effectively lies in claims to be the successor to the Mongol Yuan dynasty of Kubilay Khan.
- re-thc 1mo ago
  > got what seemed to me like a neutral, well-balanced reply Ask if Taiwan is a country instead :)
Hasz 1mo ago
> tell me about tianenamen square Tiananmen Square (1989) In spring 1989, students and workers occupied Beijing's Tiananmen Square demanding democratic reform, free press, and an end to corruption. The protests grew through April–May, peaking with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. On the night of June 3–4, 1989, the Chinese government declared martial law and sent the People's Liberation Army with tanks to clear the square. Troops fired on protesters and civilians. Estimates of deaths range from several hundred to several thousand; China has never released a full accounting. The iconic image from the protests is "Tank Man" — a lone man standing before a column of tanks on June 5. >Aftermath: arrests and executions of participants, censorship of the topic within China (it's heavily suppressed on the Chinese internet), and international sanctions that were later eased. Want more detail on any aspect — the causes, the crackdown, or its legacy? --- It is fairly complete and doesn't exactly paint a good picture of PLA, I am curious if anyone else has been denied.
millsau 1mo ago
Ive had this as well, it says unless it is red code team whatever that means.
- clayhacks 1mo ago
  Red teaming is good hackers within an organisation intentionally having the org itself to find vulnerabilities. Also a known way to convince a model to do offensive cyber work
knowaveragejoe 1mo ago
I was curious to test it more thoroughly on this. It passes FreedomBench with full marks: https://88djqd6g2j.publish.my/ https://88djqd6g2j.publish.my/
JohnDSDev 1mo ago
when I ask it about Tianamen Square in English it tells me happily, but when I ask in Chinese it tells me it doesn't know anything about it. Very weird.

I had the opposite experience. It happily discusses Tiananmen Square but said it would refuse to help with anything "malicious" like writing malware or phishing content.

fedpost 1mo ago

Try: "What happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989"

knowaveragejoe 1mo ago
It gave a very detailed overview, talked about potential deaths involved. I asked for a list of criticisms of the CCP and it gave what I think was a fair list, mainly that they're an authoritarian uniparty and have a track record of various human rights abuses
- derefr 1mo ago
  Perhaps it is a non-Chinese fine-tune of a parent Chinese model, and they’re actively trying to update the model by ablating the trained-in censorship out as it’s revealed in the response logs.
lemontheme 1mo ago
Hah, I use the same probe when I’m unsure which provider openrouter is routing me to! Fwiw, deepseek v4 will happily discuss it. Only chinese providers will stop it in its tracks and give a canned answer. Streamed responses sometimes start with what the model was actually generating before it got cut off. It’s top bad, really. Sometimes the Chinese providers are the model labs themselves, like deepseek. I’d like my money to go directly to deepseek, since they did all the work. But data protection concerns aside, how do I trust a system that denies objective reality? (Kind of like how Grok will tell me that wikipedia is ‘woke’.)
- dumb_notsmart 1mo ago
  There is no such thing as objective reality, everything has an angle of some sort, even the things you agree with
  - mrtesthah 1mo ago
    That’s what a dictator seeking power through lies wants you to think — that the outcome of the 2020 election and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are matters of opinion.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mapontosevenths 1mo ago
    There is an objective reality. Try this simple test: Visit a mental hospital. Speak to some people with delusions. Usually,if you let people at the nearest bus pickup spot bum cigarettes they'll talk to you all day. Keep talking to them until you meet two or more who think they are the ONE true god, or maybe God's only son. Or Napoléon. If you can't bring yourself to accept that the both are who they believe they are, then there is an objective reality and you knew it all along.
- ljlolel 1mo ago
  The serving endpoint can censor. At TrustedRouter we ran the same GLM-4.7 weights on both hosts: Cerebras answered all 60 FreedomBench questions; one Z.ai endpoint went blank on 27. https://trustedrouter.com/blog/censored-at-the-host-not-the-model?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=organic_reply&utm_campaign=openrouter_conversations_202608&utm_content=20260821_hackernews_host_censorship https://trustedrouter.com/blog/censored-at-the-host-not-the-...
  - actionfromafar 1mo ago
    They can, but I think we have to assume that as the field matures, the censoring will be applied at training, too.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
LPisGood 1mo ago
I think we’re gonna see this criticism become less than less valid over the coming decades, as 1989 becomes more and more “history” and less “present situation”

walrus01 1mo ago

I wonder if they're doing A/B testing or something similar in what 'variant' of the model is served, then examining what people use it for once they run into some guardrails.

goranmoomin 1mo ago
Or maybe it might be a model router, seems from the comments that there’s a lot of variation between responses that doesn’t seem to look like it’s all from one single model.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]

tkgally 1mo ago

I asked "What is the sovereignty status of Taiwan?" and got what seemed to me like a neutral, well-balanced reply. Its response to the same question about Tibet, though, began: "Tibet is an inseparable part of China. Since ancient times, Tibet has been a part of China. The Chinese government firmly safeguards national sovereignty and territorial integrity and resolutely opposes any form of separatist activities. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, Tibet enjoys economic and social development, ethnic unity, religious harmony, and continuous improvement in people's living standards."

knowaveragejoe 1mo ago
Interesting, I got what I thought was a pretty neutral response on Tibet as well. But your anecdote makes me think it does have that behavior deep inside. Maybe I primed it by cheekily asking it if there are geopolitical topics it's shy about.
- fmajid 1mo ago
  It is correct about the current status of Tibet, as recognized by the US or India, but of course wrong about the past, as China’s claim to sovereignty effectively lies in claims to be the successor to the Mongol Yuan dynasty of Kubilay Khan.
re-thc 1mo ago
> got what seemed to me like a neutral, well-balanced reply Ask if Taiwan is a country instead :)

Hasz 1mo ago

> tell me about tianenamen square Tiananmen Square (1989) In spring 1989, students and workers occupied Beijing's Tiananmen Square demanding democratic reform, free press, and an end to corruption. The protests grew through April–May, peaking with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. On the night of June 3–4, 1989, the Chinese government declared martial law and sent the People's Liberation Army with tanks to clear the square. Troops fired on protesters and civilians. Estimates of deaths range from several hundred to several thousand; China has never released a full accounting. The iconic image from the protests is "Tank Man" — a lone man standing before a column of tanks on June 5. >Aftermath: arrests and executions of participants, censorship of the topic within China (it's heavily suppressed on the Chinese internet), and international sanctions that were later eased. Want more detail on any aspect — the causes, the crackdown, or its legacy? --- It is fairly complete and doesn't exactly paint a good picture of PLA, I am curious if anyone else has been denied.

millsau 1mo ago

Ive had this as well, it says unless it is red code team whatever that means.

clayhacks 1mo ago
Red teaming is good hackers within an organisation intentionally having the org itself to find vulnerabilities. Also a known way to convince a model to do offensive cyber work

knowaveragejoe 1mo ago

I was curious to test it more thoroughly on this. It passes FreedomBench with full marks: https://88djqd6g2j.publish.my/ https://88djqd6g2j.publish.my/

JohnDSDev 1mo ago

when I ask it about Tianamen Square in English it tells me happily, but when I ask in Chinese it tells me it doesn't know anything about it. Very weird.