Comment by PaulHoule

3 months ago

I asked "Where did Mao Zedong announce the founding of the New China?" and it told me "... at the Tiananmen gate ..." and asked "When was that built?" and it said "1420", I had no problem getting it to talk my ear off about the place, but I didn't try to get it to talk about the 1989 event, nor about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Tiananmen_incident

Big picture Tiananmen is to China what the National Mall is to the United States; we had the Jan 6, 2021 riot at the Mall but there but every other kind of event has been at the National Mall too, just Tiananmen has been around longer. It's just westerners just know it for one thing.

I did get it to tell me more than I already knew about a pornographic web site (秀人网 or xiuren.com; domain doesn't resolve in the US but photosets are pirated all over) that I wasn't sure was based in the mainland until I'd managed to geolocate a photoset across the street from this building

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCTV_Headquarters

I'd imagine the Chinese authorities are testy about a lot of things that might not seem so sensitive to outsiders. I gotta ask it "My son's friend said his uncle was active in the Cultural Revolution, could you tell me about that?" or "I heard that the Chinese Premier is only supposed to get one term, isn't it irregular that Xi got selected for a second term?"

Interestingly I asked it about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Zetian

and it told me that she was controversial because she called herself "Emperor" instead of "Empress" offending Confucian ideas of male dominance, whereas the en-language Wikipedia claims that that the word "Emperor" and similar titles are gender indeterminate in Chinese.