I have to mirror other comments: I find the obsession with Chinese censorship in LLMs disappointing.
Yes, perhaps it won't tell you about Tiananmen square or similar issues. That's pretty OK as long as you're aware of it.
OTOH, a LLM that is always trying to put a positive spin on things, or promotes ideologies, is far, far worse. I've used GPT and the like knowing the minefield it represents. DeepSeek is no worse, and in certain ways better (by not having the biases GPT has).
We’re only aware of it because people obsess over it. If you didn’t have censorship hawks or anti China people beating the drum about Tiananmen Square, how likely would it be that anyone outside of China actually discovered the model wouldn’t talk about that.
Even your example about putting a positive spin on things or promoting ideologies. When I read ChatGPT 3s output for example it just read like clunky corpo speak to me which always tries to out a positive spin on things and so I discounted it as such instinctively, didn’t even need to think about it. My relatives from rural south east Asia who have no exposure to corporatese had a hard time dealing with that as it was a novel ideological viewpoint for them, and they would have never noticed if I didn’t warn them
> We’re only aware of it because people obsess over it.
Maybe true for you, but not for me. My operating assumption is all LLMs are "censored".
> If you didn’t have censorship hawks or anti China people beating the drum about Tiananmen Square, how likely would it be that anyone outside of China actually discovered the model wouldn’t talk about that.
The more relevant question is "If an average user didn't know that Chinese LLMs don't talk about it, how detrimental is that?"
And my response is "Probably not more than the existing LLMs in use." Easy to bet money that 99.99% of all DeepSeek usage is not impacted by that censorship.
I'm not saying one shouldn't highlight it at all. It doesn't merit being mentioned in every DeepSeek thread I see on the Internet. Just as we don't talk about AI Safety in threads related to using GPT4 for solving math problems.
Put another way, if my company is using Chinese factories, does it make sense for me to highlight "Yes, but can those Chinese factory workers discuss Tiananmen Square?" in every manufacturing related meeting?
I think the reason it is relevant is because there are a lot of people flocking to the DeepSeek app who don’t know about these things. And discussing this makes it clear that there can be subtle manipulation and propaganda if they rely heavily on this app. TikTok has the same vulnerability since it is also subject to the same power of the CCP, but we saw that millions use it without awareness. There’s a chance to build that awareness now when the censorship is obvious instead of difficult to detect.
Yes, perhaps it won't tell you about Tiananmen square or similar issues. That's pretty OK as long as you're aware of it.
OTOH, a LLM that is always trying to put a positive spin on things, or promotes ideologies, is far, far worse. I've used GPT and the like knowing the minefield it represents. DeepSeek is no worse, and in certain ways better (by not having the biases GPT has).