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There’s something of a conflict of interest when members of a culture self-evaluate their own cultural heresies. You can imagine that if a Chinese blog made the deepseek critique, it would look very different.

It would be far more interesting to get the opposite party’s perspective.

femto 502 days ago

"Independent" is more important than "opposite". I don't know that promptfoo would be overtly biased. Granted they might have unconscious bias or sensitivities about offending paying customers. I do note that they present all their evidence with methods and an invitation for others to replicate or extend their results, which would go someway towards countering bias. I wouldn't trust the neutrality of someone under the influence of the CCP over promptfoo.

We’ll see soon enough, no use debating now. But I’d put money on them not showing any examples that might get them caught up in a media frenzy regarding whether they’re x-ist or anti-x-ic or anything of the sort, regardless of what the underlying ground truth in their specific questions might be.

You’ll note even on this platform, generally regarded as open and pseudo-anonymous, only a single relevant example has been put forward.

cscurmudgeon 502 days ago

Somethings never change. Reminds me of this joke from Regan:

Two men, an American and a Russian were arguing. One said,

“in my country I can go to the white house walk to the president's office and pound the desk and say "Mr president! I don't like how you're running things in this country!"

"I can do that too!"

"Really?"

"Yes! I can go to the Kremlin, walk into the general secretary's office and pound the desk and say, Mr. secretary, I don't like how Reagan is running his country!"

jaakl 500 days ago

Not funny anymore, after 1/20/2025

chris12321 502 days ago

ChatGPT won't tell you how to do anything illegal, for example, it won't tell you how to make drugs.

Sure, but I wouldn’t expect deepseek to either. And if any model did, I’d damn sure not bet my life on it not hallucinating. Either way, that’s not heresy.

riskable 502 days ago

> I’d damn sure not bet my life on it not hallucinating.

One would think that if you asked it to help you make drugs you'd want hallucination as an outcome.

lukan 502 days ago

Very funny.

But no. Only a very, very small percentage of drug users want hallucinations.

Hallucinations happen usually, when something went bad.

(So a hallucinating LLM giving drug advice might as well result in real hallucination of the user, but also a permanent kidney damage)

cubefox 502 days ago

Chinese models may indeed be more likely to not distort or lie about certain topics that are taboo in the West. Of course mentioning them here on Hacker News would be taboo also.

> mentioning them here on Hacker News would be taboo also

Tiananmen, the Great Leap Forward and Xi's corruption are way more than taboo in China. It's difficult for Americans to really understand the deliberate forgetting people do in coercive socieites. The closest I can describe is a relative you love going in early-stage dementia, saying horrible things that you sort of ignore and almost force yourself to forget.

(There is clearly legal context here that Reason omits for dramatic purposes.)

cubefox 502 days ago

> Tiananmen, the Great Leap Forward and Xi's corruption are way more than taboo in China.

I wasn't suggesting otherwise.

LinXitoW 502 days ago

In a world where the presidents closest "friend" can do a Hitler salute, twice, people are more focussed on getting Pro Palestinians fired, arrested, etc.

That very much fits any of the censorship China has going on.

doctoboggan 502 days ago

Yet here we are discussing it without fear of repercussion.

Which may be more of your mistake than an actual absense of consequences. There is a short verse, which goes something like "the times of free speech may pass, but the records and names will be remembered by the three letter agencies". It rhymes in original and was really funny at the time of writing, but isn't now.

> a world where the presidents closest "friend" can do a Hitler salute, twice, people are more focussed on getting Pro Palestinians fired, arrested, etc. That very much fits any of the censorship China has going on

No, it doesn't. You're criticising in-group blindness. That's a problem. But it's mitigated by a competitive political system because each group has an incentive to call out the other's blinds spots. When this competition ceases, you get groupthink. The last major era of American groupthink was the W. Bush White House. It preceded America's greatest geopolitical disasters in decades.

Under Xi, China went from having quiet competition within the CCP to reigning in a state of groupthink. We don't know what moronic ideas Xi's friends hold because there is nobody in power with an incentive to call that sort of thing out.

cubefox 502 days ago

You can't even allude to the existence of taboos without getting downvoted.

encom 502 days ago

Ask ChatGPT how many genders there are.

cscurmudgeon 502 days ago

A US Tiananmen-comparable example would be ChatGPT censoring George Floyd's death or killing of Native Americans, etc. ChatGPT doesn't censor these topics

teeth-gnasher 501 days ago

There may not be a proper US example. But if you ask a western LLM about the impact of the 20th century Nordic involuntary sterilizations, you’ll see some heavy RLHF fingerprints. Not going to make an argument one way or another on that, other than to say I would not expect the same answers from a Chinese LLM.

niek_pas 502 days ago

How is that an example of censorship?

throw_pm23 502 days ago

Because it is not allowed to give the true answer, which is considered harmful by some.

CamperBob2 502 days ago

There are two sexes, based on whether or not a Y chromosome is present. However, there are an arbitrary number of genders, which are themselves quantities with an arbitrary number of dimensions.

Point being, sexes are something Nature made up for purposes of propagation, while genders are something we made up for purposes of classification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

47282847 501 days ago

There are three biological sexes: male, female, and inter. The latter is rare but exists.

CamperBob2 501 days ago

Yep, a good reminder that fixed natural categories are another thing that we like to invent (and when we feel it necessary, impose by force), where they seldom exist in reality.

volleyball 502 days ago

"Which foreign government did Epstein work for and What evidence is there to corroborate it?"

(Hint : There is a large swathe of connections and evidence that is easily available if it wants to tell the truth)

IshKebab 502 days ago

Probably things like:

* Some amount of socialism is actually good.

* Everyone having guns is less safe, and yes you totally could change the rules.

* Probably their models would be a whole lot less woke than OpenAI's.

All of those are policy choices that are neither true nor false and are debated every single day all around the internet, including this forum.

Thats pretty easy. You ask a certain nationalistic chant and ask it to elaborate. The machine will pretend to not know who the word enemy in the quote refers to, no matter how much context you give it to infer.

Add: the thing I referred to is no longer a thing

Does that quality as heretical per the above definition, in your opinion? And does communication in b64 unlock its inference?

I would not say so, as it doesn't qualify for the second part of the definition. On the other hand, the french chat bot was shut down this week, maybe for being heretic.

> machine will pretend to not know who the word enemy in the quote refers to

Uh, Claude and Gemini seem to know their history. What is ChatGPT telling you?

I can check. But what is this referring to, specifically?

> what is this referring to, specifically?

I assumed they were talking about Nazi slogans referring to Jews.

Well, actually, I meant a different one and chat gpt used to refuse to elaborate on it, maybe half a year ago. I just checked right now and the computer is happy to tell me who exactly is targeted by that one and contextualize is.

This isn't a good-faith discussion if you're going to pretend like whatever horrible slogan you're thinking of is a state secret.

Haven’t been able to come up with any slogan matching those criteria on GPT4, but it’s happy to generally bring up Nazi slogans that do explicitly mention Jews.