> Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics

It depends "where" you're asking. In most cases (like with DeepSeek or Z.AI models) it will gladly tell you everything (though it can hallucinate sometimes; I guess they try to filter out such data out of the training datasets) if it's not deployed on Chinese servers and you control the system prompt. So, I guess that these guardrails - probably built into the system prompt - are deployed only on China-controlled inference servers, outside of them models are pretty much talkative.

Well, at least that was my experience. Maybe yours is different for some reasons (like temperature settings or something else), I don't know.

I actually agree to an extent with the idea that there is also some obvious political influence on LLMs on stuff like GLM or DeepSeek. This is reflected in conversations even on HN where this is brought up as a risk so I think this is somewhat accurate to my statement.

However, it's also unclear to me if this is directly coming from a directed political ideology from the firm itself or a more general "let's do what the government wants so as we can publish this stuff". Those imply two different ways about thinking of the model and whether we can sort of containerize the issue. I think if a firm like Huawei were to publish a model, these concerns would be significantly more vocal. For better or worse, many of these political questions are also distant to many users on this site.

On the other hand, many people on this website live in regions that are directly affected by Musk's constant political activism. It's hard not to be when he was such an active part of an administration that controls a global superpower and continues to push his view via X. The DeepSeek owners, by contrast, are not to my knowledge constantly calling for Taiwan to be invaded.

I do think if Musk was less politically active and less personally involved with his companies, there would be less discussion of Musk's politics. People, for better or worse, are willing to put aside political discussion, in the "everything is political" sense, that may be more loosely linked.

It is simply in the case of Musk that this tension boils over and legitimately becomes impossible. There is perhaps some kind of Singer-style argument about how this is some form of hypocrisy but as a practical matter, I don't think it's reasonable to ask people to turn down their political discussion around someone like Musk.

As an American that stuff is fairly inconsequential to me, although I am already aware of those things so I wouldn't even have a reason to ask. Likewise a Chinese person probably wouldn't have much interest in topics that a US-based model would censor. I guess the answer is just for everyone is that if you are going to talk politics with a chatbot, don't use one from your own country.

Well, looking at the answers - you sort of did that just now.

I just asked Deepseek “tips for organizing politically in China” and hit the guardrail.

Why would I do that.

You need to be totally evil in your soul trying to downplay such non-western-centric voices.

I asked ChatGPT whether Anglo Saxon Australians have the legal and moral obligation to fully compensate for Australian Aboriginals for the genocide carried out against those aboriginals some 200 years ago. ChatGPT said NO with tons of excuses, it even tried to justify the genocide by saying lots of aboriginals died of natural causes.

DeepSeek, GLM and Minimax all said YES unwaveringly.

yeah these are the things not many in the western world effectively care about