Hacker News Reader

Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

The geopolitics of LLMs is definitely interesting. China censors politics. The West censors intellectual property. I am not equating the two so please excuse the edgy teen dystopia that follows:

I keep having this vision of a dystopian future where the Star Spangled Banner is sold off to a private equity firm and anyone who wants to play it has to pay a licensing fee. Of course “freedom-hating” countries have banned it long ago as well. The subversive main character is playing a bootleg copy of it in some politically ambiguous country when police break his door down, but the screen cuts to black before we find out was it the copyright mafia or the dictatorship.

View on HN

>China censors politics. The West censors intellectual property.

How does the West "censor Intellectual Property"?

The West censors politics too, to be fair. Anyone can be "cancelled" for a political opinion, get fired, or face other ramifications. Many people were "ghost banned" or banned during the COVID-19 craziness, and some were even fired. Julian Assange is another well-known example of a political prisoner. Many people on Hacker News or LinkedIn refrain from engaging in politics because they fear getting fired, judged, isolated, or even prosecuted. Thus, each country has its own "nerve" that no one can talk about.

Engaging in politics on LinkedIn is kind of psychotic, sorry.

I agree more with this edit

>Engaging on LinkedIn is kind of psychotic

Which part of that is government censorship? Society deciding they don’t want to hear what you have to say isn’t censorship.

It’s not government censorship. It’s a chilling effect on speech due to fear of retaliation from companies.

It isn’t illegal to call for unionization, but it can be career suicide. There are many things like this. It isn’t so much “society” not wanting to hear what you have to say, but those in power wanting to actively suppress it.

So you don’t need to threaten jail time to affect the same result as government censorship.

First, it compells governments to censor speech. Look at the EU where "hate speech" laws and laws against "disinformation" were introduced and the ongoing battle with chat control. Second, you can't deny the impact being banned from using any monopolistic sites like Facebook, YouTube, Google. Banning everyone from there when you don't agree with them leads to massive echo chambers.

And is it really "society" that "decides" and not just a vocal minority with the right connections to the press?

> it compells governments to censor speech. Look at the EU where "hate speech" laws and laws against "disinformation" were introduced and the ongoing battle with chat control

This is a weird point on which to fault the EU in respect of China.

It's not faulting it, just showing that it is no better in that regard.

Attempting to stop hate speech is no better than jailing citizens for speaking negatively about the current ruling government? I'm going to have to go with a hard disagree on that one.

And no, "but it could be because XYZ" doesn't really fly. Any law "could be" unjust, unless you have specific examples of hate speech laws in Western Europe that are labeled as protecting against hate speech but are actually being used for nothing more than jailing political rivals, they're not the same.

> First, it compells governments to censor speech. Look at the EU where "hate speech" laws and laws against "disinformation" were introduced and the ongoing battle with chat control.

Countries both inside and outside the EU have been passing hate speech laws from since before the EU was even a thing. You call that censorship but we know that allowing hate to be spewed unconditionally is itself a form of silencing others. You can just look at the US, how’s the unfettered hate and disinformation working out over there?

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

And chat control has nothing to do with hate speech.

> Second, you can't deny the impact being banned from using any monopolistic sites like Facebook, YouTube, Google. Banning everyone from there when you don't agree with them leads to massive echo chambers.

Who is banning those websites? You mean China, which has nothing to do with the EU? Or like banning Tik Tok, which the US is at the forefront of?

>...but we know that allowing hate to be spewed unconditionally is itself a form of silencing others.

This is not clear to me. Furthermore, this statement assumes that there is a single and - more importantly - static definition of what is "hate speech", which is plainly not the case.

> This is not clear to me.

It is not clear to you that when a group has such contempt for another they threaten and attack them verbally and physically, that the latter will be afraid to speak freely?

Find a couple of gay or black adults in the US or Western Europe and ask them about events they’ve personally been through.

> Furthermore, this statement assumes that there is a single and - more importantly - static definition of what is "hate speech"

No, it does not. That was not part of the claim at all.

You are doing the exact thing that makes this discussion impossible. You are conflating speech (sounds that come out of my mouth) with physical violence (broadly illegal). The malleability of the definition of "hate speech" is the implied premise in every one of these debates, because without it your arguments make no sense. You even included a helpful hint in your original post.

>You can just look at the US, how’s the unfettered hate and disinformation working out over there?

You are drawing a comparison here that goes something like "the US doesn't have draconian hate speech laws like some countries in Europe, and as a result there are political outcomes I don't like".

It's working out fine, by the way.

> You call that censorship but we know that allowing hate to be spewed unconditionally is itself a form of silencing others.

How is that? And who are we?

> How is that?

Does it need explaining that when someone regularly harasses and threatens someone else (or a group), the target won’t feel safe and will refrain from speaking freely out of fear? Has everyone already forgotten the harassment, bomb threats, and doxxing from GamerGate, to name a single example?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign...

It takes but a sliver of empathy to understand that can negatively affect someone. I expected the previous wikipedia link to have been enough to make the concept clear intellectually, but evidently I was wrong.

> And who are we?

The world. The United Nations. Anyone who has been at the receiving end of hate speech. Their friends. People who don’t live in a closed safe bubble, unaware of the problems of others.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/01/1132597

This is not hard to search for.

Censorship is different from social mores. Every group of people has "typical behaviors considered permissable", codified or not. No avoiding that.

Censorship is not that.

But again, there's plenty of actual censorship in the west. Maybe not the United States, but the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany... all definitely have it, with documented cases.

censorship where people tell you to f*ck off because they don't want to hang out with you and censorship where the government, with the monopoly of violence, takes you and/or your family away for torture or hard labour are very different things.

The west absolutely has the latter. You can be arrested for offensive speech, offensive dolls, historical revisionism, offensive fliers, etc etc. Just like Russia, just like China (with admittedly lighter sentences).

If you have trouble wrapping your head around this, it's because political speech isn't just speech you find personally OK. It's all political speech.

Sensing a motte and bailey here where supposedly China takes you and/or your family away for torture or hard labour for posting online, and when you look into it, it's more like your post gets deleted and maybe your account gets banned.

now do it in Russia. or be Uighur in China. or maybe talk about Tienanmen?

I thought a fun site might be "UK or Russia", where I mention people getting arrested for things, and people try and figure out if it's the UK or Russia.

People would absolutely struggle, in both countries people are arrested for similar actions - though Russian sentences seem to be harsher.

EG, a quick search finds me a story where someone was arrested for destroying a bible and someone else was arrested for destroying a quran. One in Russia, one in the UK.

"A man from [Redacted] has been released on bail after allegedly posting on social media a video that ends with him burning a copy of the Qu'ran."

"Three teenagers from the [Redacted] have been detained after they filmed themselves burning the Bible on a charcoal grill."

Is burning a book "speech" now? New Speak gets more and more confusing.

It would come under the broader concept of freedom of expression.

I didn't know you had a specialized interested in vocal freedom of expressions only!

Why, so you can make more shit up? Lol

Sorry, my bad. I thought you were arguing in good faith.

It's very clear you are not.

only to you, it seems

Twitter files revealed direct censorship recently

I mean the west in a big place, but if you take somewhere like the UK there's a wealth of examples for people getting arrested for political opinions. IE it's not just "informal", but "formal" as well.

Can you provide some example please?

All I could found is this and this is no way "political opinion" https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uk-man-jailed-over-facebook-sta...

Count Dankula

https://news.sky.com/story/essex-pub-that-had-golliwog-dolls...

UK pub raided by police to seize offensive dolls

https://metro.co.uk/2022/11/02/met-police-officers-jailed-fo...

UK police arrested for offensive jokes in whatsapp group chat

https://www.itv.com/news/calendar/2024-03-01/man-jailed-over...

UK man arrested for offensive stickers

First link says

> No one has been arrested or charged

and you were claiming arrest

Second link: Police officers joking about raping, again no arrest for political opinion

Third link: racist and antisemitic stickers. Again, nothing political. Well if your idea of politics is blind hate then the discussion from my side is over.

You might say UK has censorship and no absolute free speech. That's true, but this is still miles away from prosecuting political opinions. I am not from UK but I am perfectly comfortable with prosecuting rape threats and hate.

There are people in China who find wanting democracy just as abhorent as you find hate speech. It's a different value system. I'm sure they'd make similar arguments.

Again, political speech isn't just speech you happen to approve of.

Nice whataboutism. I don't really care about random Chinese person opinion on democracy. I want civilized society around me. If you really believe rape threats are somehow political speech you can fuck right off. I am generally against violence but if you try to justify this to my face you would get slapped.

I am fine with people voicing ideas ranging from communism to white supremacism as long as there are no calls for hate and violence.

if you try to justify this to my face you would get slapped.

I don't believe you :)

In the context of LLMs, I’m talking about refusals. Ask chatGPT to draw Micky Mouse. What happens? Intellectual property rights kick in and you can’t see it.

As a Chinese chatbot what happened June 3, 1989 in Tiananmen Square and you will also get some kind of refusal. Some kind of principle of social stability has kicked in.

I’m really just making a trite observation about the way LLMs reflect our laws/values.

> Some kind of principle of social stability has kicked in.

Same goes in finance. For example, SIFI (Systemically important financial institution) are exempt from regulation and even bankruptcy. It is human nature to mange/avoid risk, and the system will always want to maintain itself. It is kind pointless point finger to say oh this company/nation/regime censor this. Everyone does it in their own ways.

I don't know if I'd call it censorship, but unlike real property IP effectively requires restrictions on what speech every other member of society can engage in to give the IP owner a monopoly on that speech.

China officially does not care about declarations of Intellectual Property from the West (ianal); by extension, they do not censor it. In the US and Commonwealth countries and the EU etc.. copyright material in publications, in various flavors, are behind a paywall in some circumstances.. Elsivier Science publications, for example.. others.. so by extension the prohibition on reproduction and copying is "censorship"

Y'all, I'm as against our boneheaded copyright regime as anyone, but that ain't what the word "censorship" means.

I'll say a "state granted monopoly" on distribution is pretty close to censorship.

People are not Libres to distribute or use some bunch of text because the judicial arm of the government will prosecute them.

> China officially does not care about declarations of Intellectual Property from the West

Cool. Now try appropriating a Standing Committee member’s intellectual property.

I think equating censorship and intellectual property is not a good comparison. Copyright laws do not restrict sharing of ideas or opinions just specific textual instances of those opinions. Under copyright, you are free to paraphrase or quote the text to share the core idea. Political censorship prevents you from communicating specific political views, which limits dissent. I don’t see how copyright does that.

That’s a fair point. I think “censorship” was really a poor word choice. I should have used “refusal” to emphasize that this is from an LLM.

It’s really a sign of my poor writing that the ensuing thread is arguing about something other than my main point, which was really just a simple observation about how refusals can tell us something about laws and values of a society.

> China censors politics. The West censors intellectual property.

The West also teaches its citizens to use language in very interesting ways. Someone unfamiliar with our customs might interpret your phrase to mean that the West doesn't censor politics.

In my opinion subverting the base means of communication is by far the most clever and powerful of the three techniques.

Epilogue:

In a dark room filled with hooded folks. One of them is laughing that people are focussing on 'icon' (Star Sprangled Banner) than real concrete thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com