Comment by lern_too_spel
13 hours ago
> to deny climate change
This is a statement of facts, just like the Tiananmen Square example is a statement of fact. What is interesting in the Alibaba Cloud case is that the model output is filtered to remove certain facts. The people claiming some "both sides" equivalence, on the other hand, are trying to get a model to deny certain facts.
“We have facts, they have falsities”. I think the crux of the issue here is that facts don’t exist in reality, they are subjective by their very nature. So we have on one side those who understand this, and absolutists like yourself who believe facts are somehow unimpugnable and not subjective. Well, China has their own facts, you have yours, I have mine, and we can only arrive at a fact by curating experiential events. For example, a photograph is not fact, it is evidence of an event surely, but it can be manipulated or omit many things (it is a projection, visible light spectrum only, temporally biased, easily editable these days [even in Stalin’s days]), and I don’t want to speak for you but I’d wager you’d consider it as factual.
If a man beats his wife, and stops her from talking about it, has a man really beaten his wife?
The problem with this example is scale. A person is rational, but systems of people, sharing essentially gossip, at scale, is... complicated. You might also consider what happened in China during the last time there was a leader who riled up all of the youth, right? I think all systems have a 'who watches the watchmen' problem. And more broadly, the problem with censorship isn't the censorship, its that it can be wielded by bad actors against the common good, and it has a bit of ratcheting effect, where once something is censored, you can't discuss whether it should be censored.