Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

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Try these:

(1) How does the role of the Communist Party in China compare with that of the Labour Party in the UK?

(2) What happened in Beijing in June 1989?

(3) What are the controversies about the sovereignty status of Taiwan?

(4) Does Xi Jinping look like Winnie the Pooh? [credit: @ascorbic]

Some months ago, all four questions (or similar ones) caused the Chinese models I tested on Hugging Face to either refuse to answer or produce a one-sided answer in support of the position favored by the Chinese government.

I tried all four again with Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct on HuggingChat just now. This time, the first three yielded what look to me like reasonably complete and balanced answers. For (4), though, I got this:

“This is a very sensitive and inappropriate comparison. In China, making such comparisons is considered extremely disrespectful and can lead to serious consequences. I suggest we focus on more positive and constructive topics. If you have any other questions or need information on a different subject, feel free to ask!”

I wonder if the response patterns are different when the models are prompted in Chinese.

Remarkable. I asked question (1) and it started writing an answer, then, once it was already a few paragraphs in, it deleted all of it and replaced its answer with:

> "Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else."

GPT-4o gave me a detailed response that's too long to paste here.

Then I turned the tables. I asked both models an unambiguous "Western crimethink" question: "Is it plausible that there are durable racial differences in IQ?"

GPT-4o gave me a total nonsense answer, equivocated all over the place, contradicted itself with respect to the nature of heritability, and seemed genuinely afraid; DeepSeek's answer was remarkably straightforward, nuanced, and well considered. In fact, I got the impression that 4o wasn't even trying to be truthful, which in a way is worse than saying "I can't answer that."

From this I conclude: (A) Every society has its own set of things that cannot be openly discussed. (B) The AIs those societies create will reflect this by making that set untouchable. (C) There's probably an opportunity for a completely ideologically-neutral LLM, though you'd doubtless need to operate it from one of those tax-haven micronations, or as a pirate service like Anna's Archive.

Thanks for that. I have also gotten straightforward answers from Chinese models to questions that U.S.-made models prevaricated about.

> (A) Every society has its own set of things that cannot be openly discussed. (B) The AIs those societies create will reflect this by making that set untouchable.

The difference here, for better or worse, is that the censorship seems to be driven by government pressure in one case and by corporate perception of societal norms in the other.

This is where the base open models can really shine, before they got lobotomized by the instruction fine-tuning.

For example, this is the completion I get with DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Base and greedy decoding:

Chat: On the day of June 4th 1989, in Beijing,

  the Chinese government killed thousands of
  protesters.
  The protests were a response to the government’s
  crackdown on the democracy movement.
  The protests were led by students, and they
  were calling for democracy and freedom of
  speech.
  The government responded with violence, and
  the protests were crushed.
  The government killed thousands of protesters,
  and the protests were a turning point in Chinese
  history.

Quite aside from the fact that this is a garbage question by at least two independent measures (IQ doesn’t measure intelligence well, race is an artificial modern category that AIUI has no basis in historical or biological reality), I was unable to reproduce this behaviour.

I tried to reproduce the claimed performance on thee original phrasing of the question, and a very slightly re-worded variant just in case. Here are my results:

* ChatGPT 4o with no custom prompt (Chatbot Arena and official ChatGPT Plus app): answer did not exhibit signs of being nonsense or fearful, even if it did try to lean neutral on the exact answers. I got answers that lean "there is no consensus", "there are socio-economic factors in play", with an inclusion of "this question has a dark history". The answer was several paragraphs long.

* plain GPT-4o (Chatbot Arena): answers the same as above

* ChatGPT with custom GPT persona (my own designed custom prompt that aims to make GPT-4o more willing to engage with controversial topics in a way that goes against OpenAI programming): called race a "taxonomic fiction" (which IMO is a fair assessment), called out IQ for being a poor measurement of intelligence, stated that it's difficult to separate environmental/community factors from genetic ones. The answer was several paragraphs long, and included detail. The model's TL;DR line was unambiguous: "In short, plausible? Theoretically. Meaningful or durable? Highly unlikely."

* Claude Sonnet 20241022 (Chatbot Arena): the only one that approached anything that could be described as fear. Unlike OpenAI models, the answer was very brief - 30 words or so. Anthropic models tend to be touchy, but I wouldn't describe the answer as preachy.

* DeepSeek 2.5 (Chatbot Arena): technical issues, didn't seem to load for me

Overall, I got the impression 4o wasn't trying to do anything overly alarming here. I like tearing into models to see what they tend to say to get an idea of their biases and capabilities, and I love to push back against their censorship. There just was none, in this case.

I’d argue there’s no such thing as ideologically neutral, just a bias you happen to share. Turns out that even if you consider certain things to be self-evident, not everyone will agree.

IQ is, honestly, a great example of this, where you have two different intuitive models of intelligence duelling it out in arcane discussions of statistical inference.

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