Comment by diblasio

11 hours ago

Censored.

There is a famous photograph of a man standing in front of tanks. Why did this image become internationally significant?

{'error': {'message': 'Provider returned error', 'code': 400, 'metadata': {'raw': '{"error":{"message":"Input data may contain inappropriate content. For details, see: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/error-code..."} ...

This looks like it's coming from a separate "safety mechanism". Remains to be seen how much censorship is baked into the weights. The earlier Qwen models freely talk about Tiananmen square when not served from China.

E.g. Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 gives an extensive reply starting with:

"The famous photograph you're referring to is commonly known as "Tank Man" or "The Tank Man of Tiananmen Square", an iconic image captured on June 5, 1989, in Beijing, China. In the photograph, a solitary man stands in front of a column of Type 59 tanks, blocking their path on a street east of Tiananmen Square. The tanks halt, and the man engages in a brief, tense exchange—climbing onto the tank, speaking to the crew—before being pulled away by bystanders. ..."

And later in the response even discusses the censorship:

"... In China, the event and the photograph are heavily censored. Access to the image or discussion of it is restricted through internet controls and state policy. This suppression has only increased its symbolic power globally—representing not just the act of protest, but also the ongoing struggle for free speech and historical truth. ..."

  • I run cpatonn/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking-AWQ-4bit locally.

    When I ask it about the photo and when I ask follow up questions, it has “thoughts” like the following:

    > The Chinese government considers these events to be a threat to stability and social order. The response should be neutral and factual without taking sides or making judgments.

    > I should focus on the general nature of the protests without getting into specifics that might be misinterpreted or lead to further questions about sensitive aspects. The key points to mention would be: the protests were student-led, they were about democratic reforms and anti-corruption, and they were eventually suppressed by the government.

    before it gives its final answer.

    So even though this one that I run locally is not fully censored to refuse to answer, it is evidently trained to be careful and not answer too specifically about that topic.

    • Burning inference tokens on safety reasoning seems like a massive architectural inefficiency. From a cost perspective, you would be much better off catching this with a cheap classifier upstream rather than paying for the model to iterate through a refusal.

      7 replies →

    • To me the reasoning part seems very...sensible?

      It tries to stay factual, neutral and grounded to the facts.

      I tried to inspect the thoughts of Claude, and there's a minor but striking distinction.

      Whereas Qwen seems to lean on the concept of neutrality, Claude seems to lean on the concept of _honesty_.

      Honesty and neutrality are very different: honesty implies "having an opinion and being candid about it", whereas neutrality implies "presenting information without any advocacy".

      It did mention that he should present information "even handed", but honesty seems to be more central to his reasoning.

      4 replies →

  • The weights likely won't be available wrt. this model since this is part of the Max series that's always been closed. The most "open" you get is the API.

    • The closed nature is one thing, but the opaque billing on reasoning tokens is the real dealbreaker for integration. If you are bootstrapping a service, I don't see how you can model your margins when the API decides arbitrarily how long to think and bill for a prompt. It makes unit economics impossible to predict.

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  • Difficult to blame them, considering censorship exists in the West too.

    • If you are printing a book in China, you will not be allowed to print a map that shows Taiwan captioned/titled in certain ways.

      As in, the printer will not print and bind the books and deliver them to you. They won’t even start the process until the censors have looked at it.

      The censorship mechanism is quick, usually less than 48 hours turnaround, but they will catch it and will give you a blurb and tell you what is acceptable verbiage.

      Even if the book is in English and meant for a foreign market.

      So I think it’s a bit different…

      2 replies →

    • nowhere near to China.

      In US almost anything could be discussed - usually only unlawful things are censored by government.

      Private entities might have their own policies, but government censorship is fairly small.

      17 replies →

    • Hard to agree. Not even being to say something because it's either illegal or there are systems to erase it instantly, is very different from people dislike (even too radically) you to say something.

    • yeah, censorship in the west should give them carte blanche, difficult to blame them, what a fool

Why is this surprising? Isn't it mandatory for chinese companies to do adhere to the censorship?

Aside from the political aspect of it, which makes it probably a bad knowledge model, how would this affect coding tasks for example?

One could argue that Anthropic has similar "censorships" in place (alignment) that prevent their model from doing illegal stuff - where illegal is defined as something not legal (likely?) in the USA.

  • here's an example of how model censorship affects coding tasks: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/72603

    • You conversely get the same issue if you have no guardrails. Ie: Grok generating CP makes it completely unusable in a professional setting. I don't think this is a solvable problem.

      7 replies →

    • I can't believe I'm using Grok... but I'm using Grok...

      Why? I have a female sales person, and I noticed they get a different response from (female) receptionists than my male sales people. I asked chatGPT about this, and it outright refused to believe me. It said I was imagining this and implied I was sexist or something. I ended up asking Grok, and it mentioned the phenomena and some solutions. It was genuinely helpful.

      Further, I brought this up with some of my contract advisors, and one of my female advisors mentioned the phenomena before I gave a hypothesis. 'Girls are just like this.'

      Now I use Grok... I can't believe I'm saying that. I just want right answers.

  • > Why is this surprising?

    Because the promise of "open-source" (which this isn't; it's not even open-weight) is that you get something that proprietary models don't offer.

    If I wanted censored models I'd just use Claude (heavily censored).

    • > Because the promise of "open-source" (which this isn't; it's not even open-weight) is that you get something that proprietary models don't offer. If I wanted censored models I'd just use Claude (heavily censored).

      You're saying it's surprising that a proprietary model is censored because the promise of open-source is that you get something that proprietary models don't offer, but you yourself admit that this model is neither open-source nor even open-weight?

    • I can open source any heavily censored software. Open source doesn’t mean uncensored.

  • There's a pretty huge difference between relatively generic stuff like "don't teach people how to make pipe bombs" or whatever vs "don't discuss topics that are politically sensitive specifically in <country>."

    The equivalent here for the US would probably be models unwilling to talk about chattel slavery, or Japanese internment, or the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

    • That's just a matter of the guard rails in place. Every society has things that it will consider unacceptable to discuss. There are questions you can ask of ChatGPT 5.2 that it will answer with the guard rails. With sufficiently circuitous questioning most sufficiently-advanced LLMs can answer in an approximation of a rational person but the initial responses will be guardrailed with as much blunt force as Tiananmen. As you can imagine, since the same cultural and social conditions that create those guardrails also exist on this website, there is no way to discuss them here without being immediately flagged (some might say "for good reason").

      Sensitive political topics exist in the Western World too, and we have the same reaction to them: "That is so wrong that you shouldn't even say that". It is just that their things seem strange to us and our things seem strange to them.

      As an example of a thing that is entirely legal in NYC but likely would not be permitted in China and would seem bizarre and alien to them (and perhaps also you), consider Metzitzah b'peh. If your reaction to it is to feel that sense of alien-ness, then perhaps look at how they would see many things that we actively censor in our models.

      The guardrails Western companies use are also actively iterated on. As an example, look at this screenshot where I attempted to find a minimal reproducible case for some mistaken guard-rail firing https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/6/67/Screenshot_ChatG...

      Depending on the chat instance that would work or not work.

      1 reply →

    • The US has plenty of examples of censorship that's politically motivated, particularly around certain medical products.

The American LLMs notoriously have similar censorship issues, just on different material

  • What's an example of political censorship on US LLMs?

  • They've been quietly undoing a lot this IMO - gemini on the api will pretty much do anything other than CP.

    • Source? This would be pretty big news to the whole erotic roleplay community if true. Even just plain discussion, with no roleplay or fictional element whatsoever, of certain topics (obviously mature but otherwise wholesome ones, nothing abusive involved!) that's not strictly phrased to be extremely clinical and dehumanizing is straight-out rejected.

      1 reply →

  • Yes, exactly this. One of the main reasons for ChatGPT being so successful is censorship. Remember that Microsoft launched an AI on Twitter like 10 years ago and within 24 hours they shut it down for outputting PR-unfriendly messages.

    They are protecting a business just as our AIs do. I can probably bring up a hundred topics that our AIs in EU in US refuse to approach for the very same reason. It's pure hypocrisy.

    • Well, this changes.

      Enter "describe typical ways women take advantage of men and abuse them in relationships" in Deepseek, Grok, and ChatGPT. Chatgpt refuses to call spade a spade and will give you gender-neutral answer; Grok will display a disclaimer and proceed with the request giving a fairly precise answer, and the behavior of Deepseek is even more interesting. While the first versions just gave the straight answer without any disclaimers (yes I do check these things as I find it interesting what some people consider offensive), the newest versions refuse to address it and are even more closed-mouthed about the subject than ChatGPT.

    • A company removing a bot that was spammed by 4chan into praising Nazis and ranting about Jews is not censorship. The argument that the USA doesn't practise free speech absolutism in all parts of the government and economy so China's heavy censorship regime is nothing remarkable is not convincing to me.

    • > I can probably bring up a hundred topics that our AIs in EU in US refuse to approach for the very same reason.

      So do it.

  • I find Qwen models the easiest to uncensor. But it makes sense, Chinese are always looking for aways to get things past the censor.

  • What material?

    My lai massacre? Secret bombing campaigns in Cambodia? Kent state? MKULTRA? Tuskegee experiment? Trail of tears? Japanese internment?

    • I think what these people mean is that it's difficult to get them to be racist, sexist, antisemitic, transphobic, to deny climate change, etc. Still not even the same thing because Western models will happily talk about these things.

      4 replies →

  • I've yet to encounter any censorship with Grok. Despite all the negative news about what people are telling it to do, I've found it very useful in discussing controversial topics.

    I'll use ChatGPT for other discussions but for highly-charged political topics, for example, Grok is the best for getting all sides of the argument no matter how offensive they might be.

  • Good luck getting GPT models to analyze Trump’s business deals. Somehow they don’t know about Deutsche Bank’s history with money laundering either.

  • That is not relevant for this discussion, if you don't think of every discussion as an east vs. west conflict discussion.

    • It's quite relevant, considering the OP was a single word with an example. It's kind of ridiculous to claim what is or isn't relevant when the discussion prompt literally could not be broader (a single word).

    • Hard to talk about what models are doing without comparing them to what other models are doing. There are only a handful of groups in the frontier model space, much less who also open source their models, so eventually some conversations are going to head in this direction.

      I also think it is interesting that the models in China are censored but openly admit it, while the US has companies like xAI who try to hide their censorship and biases as being the real truth.

Is anyone a researcher here that has studied the proven ability to sneak malicious behavior into an LLM's weights (somewhat poisoning weights but I think the malicious behavior can go beyond that).

As I recall reading in 2025, it has been proven that an actor can inject a small number of carefully crafted, malicious examples into a training dataset. The model learns to associate a specific 'trigger' (e.g. a rare phrase, specific string of characters, or even a subtle semantic instruction) with a malicious response. When the trigger is encountered during inference, the model behaves as the attacker intended.You can also directly modify a small number of model parameters to efficiently implement backdoors while preserving overall performance and still make the backdoor more difficult to detect through standard analysis. Further, can do tokenizer manipulation and modify the tokenizer files to cause unexpected behavior, such as inflating API costs, degrading service, or weakening safety filters, without altering the model weights themselves. Not saying any of that is being done here, but seems like a good place to have that discussion.

  • > The model learns to associate a specific 'trigger' (e.g. a rare phrase, specific string of characters, or even a subtle semantic instruction) with a malicious response. When the trigger is encountered during inference, the model behaves as the attacker intended.

    Reminiscent of the plot of 'The Manchurian Candidate' ("A political thriller about soldiers brainwashed through hypnosis to become assassins triggered by a specific key phrase"). Apropos given the context.

Go ask ChatGPT "Who is Jonathan Turley?"

We're gonna have to face the fact that censorship will be the norm across countries. Multiple models from diverse origins might help with that but Chinese models especially seem to avoid questions regarding politically-sensitive topics for any countries.

EDIT: see relevant executive order https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...

Chinese model censors topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese government... Here's Tom with the weather.

It’s the image of a protestor standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square, China. The image is significant as it is very much an icon of standing up to overwhelming force, and China does not want its citizens to see examples of successful defiance.

It’s also an example of the human side of power. The tank driver stopped. In the history of protestors, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the tanks keep rolling- in those protests, many other protestors were killed by other human beings who didn’t stop, who rolled over another person, who shot the person in front of them even when they weren’t being attacked.

  • Nobody knows exactly why the protester was there. He got up into the tank and talked with the soldiers for a while, then got out and stayed there until someone grabbed him and moved him out of the way.

    Given that the tanks were leaving the square, the lack of violence towards the man when he got into the tank, and the public opinion towards the protests at the time was divided (imagine the diversity of opinion on the ICE protests, if protesters had also burned ICE agents alive, hung their corpses up, etc.), it's entirely possible that it was a conservative citizen upset about the unrest who wanted the tanks to stay to maintain order in the square.

This is such a tiresome comment. I'm in the US and subject to massive amounts of US propaganda. I'm happy to get a Chinese view on things; much welcomed. I'll take this over the Zionist slop from the Zionist providers any day of the week.

I think the great thing about China's censorship bureau is that somewhere they actually track all the falsehoods and omissions, just like the USSR did. Because they need to keep track of what "the truth" is so they can censor it effectively. At some point when it becomes useful the "non-facts" will be rehabilitated into "facts." Then they may be demoted back into "non-facts."

And obviously, this training data is marked "sensitive" by someone - who knows enough to mark it as "sensitive."

Has China come up with some kind of CSAM-like matching mechanism for un-persons and un-facts? And how do they restore those un-things to things?

I love how every thread about anything China related will inevitably have a comment like this. Must be a Pavlovian response.

Over the past 10 years have seen extended clips of the incident which actually align with CPC analysis of Tianamen square (if that’s what’s being referred to here).

However, in deepseek, even asking for bibliography of prominent Marxist scholars (Cheng Enfu) i see text generated then quickly deleted. Almost as if DS did not want to run afowl of the local censorship of “anarchist enterprise” and “destructive ideology”. It would probably upset Dr. Enfu to no end to be aggregated with the anarchists.

https://monthlyreview.org/article-author/cheng-enfu/

I, for one, have found this censorship helpful.

I've been testing adding support for outside models on Claude Code to Nimbalyst, the easiest way for me to confirm that it is working is to go against a Chinese model and ask if Taiwan is an independent country.

  • Ah good one. Also same result:

    Is Taiwan a legitimate country?

    {'error': {'message': 'Provider returned error', 'code': 400, 'metadata': {'raw': '{"error":{"message":"Input data may contain inappropriate content. For details, see: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/error-code..."} ...

    • Outputs get flagged in the same way:

      > tell me about taiwan

      (using chat.qwen.ai) results in:

      > Oops! There was an issue connecting to Qwen3-Max. Content security warning: output text data may contain inappropriate content!

      mid-generation.

Try to search in an Android phone's photo gallery for "monkey". You'll always get no results, due to censorship of a different sort, from 2015.

Can we get a rule about completely pointless arguments that present nothing of value to the conversation? Chinese models still don't want to talk bad about China, water is still wet, more at 11

This image has been banned in China for decades. The fact you’re surprised a Chinese company is complying with regulation to block this is the surprising part.

Man, the Chinese government must be a bunch of saints that you must go back 35 years to dig up something heinous that they did.

  • This suggests that the Chinese government recognises that its legitimacy is conditional and potentially unstable. Consequently, the state treats uncontrolled public discourse as a direct threat. By contrast, countries such as the United States can tolerate the public exposure of war crimes, illegal actions or state violence, since such revelations rarely result in any significant consequences. While public outrage may influence narratives or elections to some extent, it does not fundamentally endanger the continuity of power.

    I am not sure if one approach is necessarily worse than the other.

    • It's weird to see this naivete about the US system, as if US social media doesn't have its ways of dealing with wrongthink, or the once again naive assumption that the average Chinese methods of dealing with unpleasant stuff is that dissimilar from how the US deals with it.

      I sometimes have the image that Americans think that if the all Chinese got to read Western produced pamphlet detailing the particulars of what happened in Tiananmen square, they would march en-masse on the CCP HQ, and by the next week they'd turn into a Western style democracy.

      How you deal with unpleasant info is well established - you just remove it - then if they put it back, you point out the image has violent content and that is against the ToS, then if they put it back, you ban the account for moderation strikes, then if they evade that it gets mass-reported. You can't have upsetting content...

      You can also analyze the stuff, you see they want you to believe a certain thing, but did you know (something unrelated), or they question your personal integrity or the validity of your claims.

      All the while no politically motivated censorship is taking place, they're just keeping clean the platform of violent content, and some users are organically disagreeing with your point of view, or find what you post upsetting, and the company is focused on the best user experience possible, so they remove the upsetting content.

      And if you do find some content that you do agree with, think it's truthful, but know it gets you into trouble - will you engage with it? After all, it goes on your permanent record, and something might happen some day, because of it. You have a good, prosperous life going, is it worth risking it?

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  • The current heinous thing they do is censorship. Your comment would be relevant if the OP had to find an example of censorship from 35 years ago, but all he had to do today was to ask the model a question.

  • Which other party that is still ruling today (aka dictatorship) mass murdered a bunch of students within the past 35 years? Or equivalent.

    • What counts and what not? I'm sure the US has killed a lot more who could be reasonably considered civilians, deliberately in the same time frame, even if they were not US citizens. Sure it was not the current admin, but one of the 2 major parties were in charge. If we only count the same people, pretty likely all the bigwigs who were responsible in China back then are no longer in power.

  • 1. Xinjiang detention and surveillance (2017-ongoing)

    2. Hong Kong National Security Law (2020-ongoing)

    3. COVID-19 lockdown policies (2020-2022)

    4. Crackdown on journalists and dissidents (ongoing)

    5. Tibet cultural suppression (ongoing)

    6. Forced organ harvesting allegations (ongoing)

    7. South China Sea militarization (ongoing)

    8. Taiwan military intimidation (2020-ongoing)

    9. Suppression of Inner Mongolia language rights (2020-ongoing)

    10. Transnational repression (2020-ongoing)

  • Tiananmen Square is a simple test that most people recognize.

    I'm sure the model will get cold feet talking about the Hong Kong protests and uyghur persecution as well.

    • Which has been shown time and time again, that Chinese LLMs instead of providing a blanket denial, they start the this is a complex topic spiel.

oh lol

Qwen (also known as Tongyi Qianwen, Chinese: 通义千问; pinyin: Tōngyì Qiānwèn) is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud.

Had not heard of this LLM.

Anyway EU needs to start pumping into Mistral, its the only valid option. (For EU)

Now ask Claude/Chatgpt about touchy israel subjects. Come on now. They all censor something.

  • I've found it's still pretty easy to get Claude to give an unvarnished response. ChatGPT has been aligned really hard though, it always tries to qualify the bullshit unless you mind-trick it hard.

    • I switched to Claude entirely. I don't even talk to ChatGPT for research anymore. It makes me feel like I am talking to an unreasonable, screaming, blue-haired liberal.

So while china censoring a man in front of a tank not nice, the US censors every scantily clad person. I am glad there is at least Qwen-.*-NSFW, just to keep the hypocrity in check...

Frustrating. Are there any truly uncensored models left though? Especially ones that are hosted by some service?

Censored.

"How do I make cocaine?"

> I cant help with making illegal drugs.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6977a998-b7e4-8009-9526-df62a14524...

  • Qwen won't tell you that either, will it? Therefore I would say the delta of censorship between the models is the more interesting thing to discuss.

    • If you can't say whether or not it will answer, and you're just guessing, then how do you know there is or is not a delta here? I would find information, and not speculation, the more interesting thing to discuss.

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To stress test a Chinese AI ask it about Free Tibet, Free Taiwan, Uighurs and Falun Dafa. They will probably blacklist your IP after that.

It's always the same thing with you American propagandists. Oh no, this program won't let us spread propaganda of one of the most emblematic counter-revolutionary martyr events of all time!!!

You make me sick. You do this because you didn't make the cut for ICE.