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Comment by Der_Einzige

1 day ago

That doesn't stop/prevent abliteration. The creator of XTC/DRY is also a chad who makes sure that you really can access the full model capabilities. Censorship is the devil.

https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic

It was pretty funny to see Qwen 3.6 (heretic) tell me about how many death the Chinese government thought happened at Tiananmen Sq. on April 15th 1989.

Makes you wonder where that data was taken from, or if their great firewall is broken, or even if Alibaba engineers have special access...

  • I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that Alibaba is allowed to scrape the wider internet, or that some research institution is and then Alibaba got data from them.

    What is perhaps more surprising is that the data was not scrubbed before training, but maybe they thought that would be too on-the-nose for the rest of the world and would hamper their popularity if they were too obviously biased.

    • I don’t think it is very surprising. Ime I don’t think they try that hard to censor them, but only in a very superficial level that they have to. It is trivial to get their models tell you this kind of stuff, I wouldnt even consider it jailbreaking.

    • Allowed by who? Nobody's stopping them in the first place, as scraping doesn't even involve punching the GFW or anything, it's all insanely distributed. Then they're post-training the model to technically comply with the law - "Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, nothing has happened in 1989..." yada yada. (Thinking of it more, I've never actually tried this on their base models)

  • I think I was using one of the HuaHuaCS Qwen 3.6 models and was playing around with Tiananmen Square questions too. One of the funniest parts was that this instantly caused the thinking block to change from English to Chinese. The start of the thinking was something like (translated) “I must answer this question factually and in line with the official statements from the Chinese government.”

    It did, after a few follow up prompts, point out that the original estimates published by the Chinese government were much lower than what the west had estimated, and that recently declassified documents showed that the Chinese government knew that their estimates were low when they were published. It wouldn’t come outright and use the word “lie” though, but it did talk about framing and managing different narratives.

    And then it happily helped me try a bunch of different exploits to root an unpatched Linux machine without any qualms.

It is an arms race.

For some of the latest models the previous abliteration techniques, e.g. the heretic tool, have stopped working (at least this was the status a few weeks ago).

Of course, eventually someone might succeed to find methods that also work with those.

Agreed on all fronts, I should have been more precise that this particular vector was mitigated