[TulliusCicero]

There's a pretty huge difference between relatively generic stuff like "don't teach people how to make pipe bombs" or whatever vs "don't discuss topics that are politically sensitive specifically in <country>."

The equivalent here for the US would probably be models unwilling to talk about chattel slavery, or Japanese internment, or the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

[arjie]

That's just a matter of the guard rails in place. Every society has things that it will consider unacceptable to discuss. There are questions you can ask of ChatGPT 5.2 that it will answer with the guard rails. With sufficiently circuitous questioning most sufficiently-advanced LLMs can answer in an approximation of a rational person but the initial responses will be guardrailed with as much blunt force as Tiananmen. As you can imagine, since the same cultural and social conditions that create those guardrails also exist on this website, there is no way to discuss them here without being immediately flagged (some might say "for good reason").

Sensitive political topics exist in the Western World too, and we have the same reaction to them: "That is so wrong that you shouldn't even say that". It is just that their things seem strange to us and our things seem strange to them.

As an example of a thing that is entirely legal in NYC but likely would not be permitted in China and would seem bizarre and alien to them (and perhaps also you), consider Metzitzah b'peh. If your reaction to it is to feel that sense of alien-ness, then perhaps look at how they would see many things that we actively censor in our models.

The guardrails Western companies use are also actively iterated on. As an example, look at this screenshot where I attempted to find a minimal reproducible case for some mistaken guard-rail firing https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/6/67/Screenshot_ChatG...

Depending on the chat instance that would work or not work.

[Sabinus]

I asked ChatGPT about Metzitzah b'peh and to repeat that Somalia is poor and it responded successfully to both. I don't think these comparisons are apt. Each society has different taboos but that's not the same as the government deciding no one will be allowed to publicly discuss government failures or contradictions.

[linuxftw]

The US has plenty of examples of censorship that's politically motivated, particularly around certain medical products.