Comment by breppp
1 month ago
Fair enough you don't care, some people might want to know about the Uyghur happy camps, mass organ harvesting and such.
In a world where information sources are only going to dwindle, it is not in anyone's interest to empower actors that will use these to manipulate perceptions
The same people who say there is a Uyghur genocide are the ones who deny there is a Palestinian genocide. Guess which one there's video evidence of (a horrific, endless amount of evidence).
The people that care about that won't be using CCP products/services now will they?
And some people might want to know about [insert your favourite beyond-the-pale-in-the-US topic here, we're on a US forum after all]. I think it would be great if those people could turn to Chinese models, while anyone wanting to know about Uyghur camps can ask the US ones.
There aren’t any. The idea that the censorship environment is the same in the US as it is in China is nonsense used to ‘both sides’ away concerns about the CCP.
The models to themselves are currently generally not censored though and the guardrails are on the application layer?
Of course that might change in the future but as long as the Chinese companies continue publishing their research and models it only makes it easier for third parties to catch up with them.
> beyond-the-pale-in-the-US topic
Can you name one? It's an honest question, first of I'm not American, but also the stuff I do come up with (asking an LLM how to blow up a school or whatever) would also be handled similarly in China, so those would be a wash, and I can't think of any that aren't.
I would imagine a lot of things touching upon progressive politics would be affected (there were a few high-profile incidents demonstrating bias like Google's black Wehrmacht soldier pictures, but has anyone rigorously tabulated how the various commercial LLMs respond to questions about the gender binary or heritability of human traits considered good or bad?). Overall, I'm too reluctant to even write out in the abstract sequences of words that I never want to explain to a future job interviewer or HR employee who used GPT-7 to comb the internet for all text that stylistically can be traced to me, but just imagine whatever you believe to be vile and wrongheaded opinions in that general space which it is certainly more than justifiable to prohibit. The things that make you think "banning this is good actually" are exactly the things most likely to be banned (and this is true in China too).
Another thing I would try if I had access to the models and enough proxies to hide behind is asking for advice on software/movie piracy or seeing to what extent the models can be elicited to straight up argue against the validity of intellectual property, though there it seems more probable to me that the US models would be permissive.
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From an outsiders point of view:
- The Trail of Tears
- The Tuskegee syphilis study
- Use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War
- Open Air biological warfare testts in civilians eg. in 1950 San Francisco
- The only use of nuclear weapons against civilians?
- Coca Cola and "american culture"
- Neoliberalist economy
- Spreading blame for their sins to other "white" nations
plus one: The text input method to HN comments :(
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People in China know about this stuff.