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I don’t see how that responds to the point in the parent comment. Censorship or not, chatbots are unreliable for serious history questions.

Just today Gemma told me that for a long time the Iliad and Odyssey were considered mediocre literature. I was skeptical so I cross referenced, but a lot of more subtle errors could get by.

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You have misunderstood the point they are making. They’re not proposing that chatbots are good for history research - just pointing out the differences in what our nations seem to find important to censor.

Indeed. A counter example might be to ask the model to write a test case for a legacy C codebase, to test for writing to a null pointer. If the model refuses to answer, it's possibly a US model, and likely an Anthropic model.

the point is if you ask "hey qwen, are your dataset or training manipulated in deference to the Chinese government?" there is no guarantee you will get the right answer. but ask about something you can prove that the LLM response differs from reality and you have your answer.

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