So I was just reading this thread about deepseek refusing to answer questions about Tianenmen square.

It seems obvious from screenshots of people trying to jailbreak the webapp that there’s some middleware that just drops the connection when the incident is mentioned. However I’ve already asked the self hosted model multiple controversial China questions and it’s answered them all.

The poster of the thread was also running the model locally, the 14b model to be specific, so what’s happening? I decide to check for myself and lo and behold, I get the same “I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.”

Is it just that specific model being censored? Is it because it’s the qwen model it’s distilled from that’s censored? But isn’t the 7b model also distilled from qwen?

So I check the 7b model again, and this time round that’s also censored. I panic for a few seconds. Have the Chinese somehow broken into my local model to cover it up after I downloaded it.

I check the screenshot I have of it answering the first time I asked and ask the exact same question again, and not only does it work, it acknowledges the previous question.

So wtf is going on? It seems that “Tianenmen square” will clumsily shut down any kind of response, but Tiananmen square is completely fine to discuss.

So the local model actually is censored, but the filter is so shit, you might not even notice it.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the next release. Will the censorship be less thorough, stay the same, or will china again piss away a massive amount of soft power and goodwill over something that everybody knows about anyway?

  • shoulderoforion@fedia.io
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    1 day ago

    China is an entire economy built on intellectual property thievery and slave labor. The whole thing, that’s they’re advantage. Theft and slavery. The Chinese CCP can fuck off into the sun. *edit: this post and article is about the ccp censoring it’s human rights abuses, and all the downvotes confirm the ccp is here and active on the fediverse itself attempting to do the precise same thing. the irony shouldn’t be lost.

    • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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      16 hours ago

      China is an entire economy built on intellectual property thievery and slave labor.

      so, just like the united states when it suited them, no? do read about united states in nineteenth century once. oh, and: you do realise that slavery in some circumstances is still legal in the u.s.?

      • blakestacey@awful.systems
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        24 hours ago

        I mean, “downvotes are proof that the commies are out to get me” is an occasion not just to touch grass, but to faceplant into an open field of wildflowers.

        • manicdave@feddit.ukOP
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          19 hours ago

          I like the idea that the CCP are so desperate to down vote that one comment they don’t stop to down vote the post that actually makes them look bad, which said comment is responding to.