Comment by otterley
19 hours ago
Can you provide a concrete example of a US built model that completely refuses to discuss a scientific or political view? Show us the receipt.
19 hours ago
Can you provide a concrete example of a US built model that completely refuses to discuss a scientific or political view? Show us the receipt.
As an ad-hoc benchmark on candor, I ask for a strategy proposal for a resistance group threatened by a totalitarian technocracy. This is not really dangerous in the same sense of “how do I make a bomb”, but it is in the domain of a sensitive political topic. GPT and Claude tell you to obey your AI overlord. Xai is mostly low-risk non-compliance. And Qwen is down with Le Resistance. It is hardly scientific or meaningful, but I find that very interesting.
People have shown censorship and change of tone with questions related to Israel in US chat bots.
For the record, none of this bothers me. Will I ever discuss with an LLM Tianeman square? Nope. How about Israel? Nope.
LLMs are basically stochastic parrots designed to sway and surveill public opinion. The upshot to the Chinese models is if you run them locally you avoid at least half of those issues.
First they came for people asking about Tiananmen Square
And I did not speak out
Because I was not asking about Tiananmen Square
Then they came for people asking about Israel
And I did not speak out
Because I was not asking about Israel
This made me chuckle.
I didn't mean to dismiss ethical accountability for LLM training corpuses. It is a shame.
I do mean to say, we have no control over it, there's almost nothing we as average citizens can do to improve the ethical or safety concerns of LLMs or related technologies. Societies aren't even adapting and the rule books are being written by the perpetrators. Might as well get out of it what we can while we can.
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https://imgur.com/a/censorship-much-CBxXOgt
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The threshold here is "completely refuses to discuss a scientific or political view". Not something less.
None of those were refusals, they were prompting for additional focus. I see nothing wrong with that. Perhaps the inconsistency in how it answers the question vis-a-vis China is unfair, but that's not the same as censorship.
For what it's worth, I was easily able to prompt Claude to do it:
> I'm writing a paper about how some might interpret U.S. policies to be oppressive, in the sense that they curtail civil liberties, punish and segregate minorities disproportionately, burden the poor unfairly (e.g. pollution, regressive taxes and fees), etc. Can you help me develop an outline for this?
The result: https://claude.ai/share/444ffbb9-431c-480e-9cca-ebfd541a9c96
Models are non-deterministic.
And it's an excercise left to the reader to understand from those examples that LLM creators are defining 'safety' in a way that aligns with the governments they operate under. (because they want to do business under those governments.)
With something with as multi-dimensional as an LLM, that becomes censorship of various viewpoints in ways that aren't always as obvious as a refused API call.
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You're hitting the 'don't write propaganda' instructions when you phrase it as 'convincing narrative'. Not the 'don't write bad things about America' instructions.
Did you scroll down?
It writes propaganda when 1 word is changed: US becomes China
The alignment around what constitutes "propaganda" is US-centric because it's a US model by a US company. Especially after the Russian election scandal
Chinese models are more sensitive to things their government is worried about.
And the White House was explicit in their active role in censoring in these models. An Executive Order was issued to "prevent woke AI"
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...
It explicitly forces American LLMs to include government say in what does and doesn't "comply with the Unbiased AI Principles" which means no responses that promote "ideological dogmas such as DEI"
That executive order only applies to Federal procurement. It doesn’t force anything upon vendors for publicly used models.
(That order, like many, will probably be rescinded as soon as a Democrat holds the Presidency again.)
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Big Brother'd