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by vaccineai 515 days ago
Because China censors very common words and phrases such as "harmonized", "shameless", "lifelong", "river crabbed", "me too". This is because Chinese citizens uses puns and common phrases initially to get around censors.
3 comments

Don't forget "Winnie the Pooh"!
OpenAI models refuse to translate subtitles because they contain violence, sex, or racism.

That’s just a different flavour of enforced right-think.

They are absolutely different flavors. OpenAI is not being told by the government to censor violence, sex or racism - they're being told that by their executives.

News flash: household-name businesses aren't going to repeat slurs if the media will use it to defame them. Nevermind the fact that people will (rightfully) hold you legally accountable and demand your testimony when ChatGPT starts offering unsupervised chemistry lessons - the threat of bad PR is all that is required to censor their models.

There's no agenda removing porn from ChatGPT any more than there's an agenda removing porn from the App Store or YouTube. It's about shrewd identity politics, not prudish shadow government conspiracies against you seeing sex and being bigoted.

I don't know why people care if they're being censored by government officials or private billionaires. What difference does it make at the end of the day? why is one worse than the other?
Because you aren't being "censored" by billionaires at all. They have made the business decision to reduce the usefulness of their AI to prevent their liability from being legally, or even socially, held accountable.

Again, consider my example about YouTube - it's not illegal for Google to put pornography on YouTube. They still moderate it out though, not because they want to "censor" their users but because amateur porn is a liability nightmare to moderate. Similarly, I don't think ChatGPT's limitations qualify as censorship.

Okay, i mean you can say censorship isn't censorship if you want? This is my point, why are you treating limits placed on your expression/sharing/information differently based on what type of person is doing it?
Because fundamentally it's the same type of censorship as someone deciding to not sell porn magazines, videos or the the Anarchist Cookbook in their newsstand/bookstore/etc. back in the day. They judged (probably quite rightly) that it's not good for business.

Of course the market being extremely concentrated and effectively an oligopoly even in the best case does shine a somewhat different light on it. Until/unless open models catch up both quality and accessibility wise.

Sigh. No. Censorship is censorship is censorship. That is true even if you happen to like and can generate a plausible defense of US version that happens to be business friendly ( as opposed to China's ruling party friendly ).
> Censorship is censorship is censorship

"if your company doesn't present hardcore fisting pornography to five year olds you're a tyrant" is a heck of a take, even for hacker news.

It is not a take. It is simple position of 'just because you call something as involuntary semen injection does not make it any less of a rape'. I like things that are clear and well defined. And so I repeat:

Censorship is censorship is censorship.

Ok, I guess I'm #TeamProCensorship, then. So is almost everyone.
Usually a sign of great discussion when someone responds with "sigh" to a reasonably presented argument.
Is "Pooh" also censored?