[3rodents]

If this were true, why didn’t the chatbot immediately recognize that the word “Taiwan” should trigger the response? Detecting the word “Taiwan” has been possible since before most of us were born.

China has more restrictions on what you can say than the U.S. but what you are describing is not reality. Some westerner asking Deepseek about Taiwan is completely uninteresting. Just as the government do not chase people over VPN usage.

China doesn’t try to hide that they are an authoritarian state. They don’t need to. Most people in China are no less happy with their government than westerners are with their governments. Governments reflect culture. And as for foreigners, our view of China is far worse than it actually is, China doesn’t need to hide anything, people who visit China will come away with a more positive view of the country than those who do not visit.

[gs17]

> If this were true, why didn’t the chatbot immediately recognize that the word “Taiwan” should trigger the response?

Not recognizing they were outputting wrongthink until after it was being streamed to the user is a known behavior with some Chinese chatbot apps. A quick search found an example of DeepSeek doing it: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1ic3kl6/deepseek_ce...

I don't think his story is genuine, but it showing the "wrong" answer before correcting itself is known behavior.

EDIT: Here's an example of it outputting a full response about Taiwan specifically before removing it: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1i7ceol/...

[recursive]

I've seen it from the non-Chinese ChatGPT before. Something was deemed to be violating the sensitivity filters or something, and it refused to answer. But only after I saw part of the real answer streamed to the output, and then redacted and replaced.

[CWuestefeld]

This is manifestly false.

My wife grew up in Shanghai, and you'll have to go quite some distance to find someone more critical of the PRC and CCP than she is. And it's with good reason.

She grew up during the cultural revolution, and was largely raised by her grandmother because literally every other person in her extended family was in prison or work camp, not because of anything they had actually done wrong, but for political reasons because the whole family was blacklisted.

And that's not just the old days. Her father died as a direct result of Chinese Covid policy. During the pandemic her cousins still in the country would ask her (on Skype) "is X true?", and largely their perception of what was going on was false. She would exfiltrate encrypted news reports to them - until those started getting blocked. Her dad's estate still has affairs that need to be resolved, but we've decided not to return to China until Xi is gone, as it's just not safe. It doesn't get much airplay, but there are currently a couple of hundred Americans who are being illegally detained in China right now. It's not worth the risk.

My first trip to China was about 30 years ago, shortly after we got married. And back then, I would have said that you were right. Honestly, it felt like for the average person in their day-to-day-lives, the Chinese were less under the governmental thumb than we are. People from the countryside would bring their produce into the city to sell, or cook dumplings and buns to sell on the side of the street - stuff that in America we'd have to get permits for. It seemed that the oligarchy had an understanding with the people: let us control the big picture, and we'll look the other way for the little things. But Chinese politics is a pendulum swinging very widely. From Tienanmen Square and Tank Man, it had swung quite a bit the other way. But today, it's come back 180-degrees. Xi is really trying for a Cultural Revolution 2.0.

These impressions largely match what I hear from other Chinese immigrants - except for Party members, who tend not to want to talk about it at all. I'm afraid that you've been listening to too much propaganda.

[hungryhobo]

i don't doubt your experience, but just know it might be skewed and not representative of everyone's opinions

the sense i get from my chinese friends are that the CCP is an annoying parent but they understand the challenges both domestic and international and largely agree with the compromises

[vkou]

> Her father died as a direct result of Chinese Covid policy.

Is it generally normal to hold countries accountable for every person that dies due to their COVID policies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_a...

[fennecbutt]

Nice sample size of 1

[tw1984]

Cultural Revolution is all about totally politicalised society, extremely polarised, regular people fight against each other based on ideologies. Isn't that the current west?

> because literally every other person in her extended family was in prison or work camp

translate for you - her family was heavily involved in politics, it is just unlucky that her family was not on the winning side, so she hates whatever happened.

posting from Shanghai, going back to the 3rd world west in a few days.

[KHRZ]

DeepSeek would print all it's mental gymnastics to censor itself in the reasoning phase directly to the user, before shutting down the conversation. Apparantly such an odd move is a thing in China.

[glenstein]

Right, I think deepseek continues to be massively misunderstood. It appears to be a replication of existing technologies done more efficiently rather than a breakthrough in terms of bootstrapping from the ground up with new capabilities. And at this point people will start saying "well does that matter?" and the answer is yes.

[libertine]

You can trigger that behavior with Deepseek, just try it yourself.

[sarchertech]

>And as for foreigners, our view of China is far worse than it actually is, China doesn’t need to hide anything, people who visit China will come away with a more positive view of the country than those who do not visit.

To the extent that's true, it's because they won't let you see the uyghur reeducation camps.

[analog8374]

What's the coordinates? I want to look at it on Google maps

[MaxPock]

We can get videos from remote hellholes of Africa like Dafur and Mali but apparently,that's too much to ask in Xinjiang.We can't even get satellite images to show us evidence of this so called wigur genocide