6 ms·
What political censorship looks like inside an LLM's weights (Qwen 3.5)
- dang 4mo ago[stub for offtopicness]
- chaosbolt 4mo ago[flagged]
- ebbi 4mo agoI wonder why the other comment on here, that talked about the political censorship in ChatGPT about Israel, got deleted?
- Creamsicle47 4mo agoTake a guess
- ebbi 4mo ago"What political censorship looks like inside HN" lol
- dang 4mo agoIt wasn't about Israel, and it didn't get deleted. It got flagkilled for obviously breaking the site guidelines. Killed posts remain visible to users who have 'showdead' turned on in their profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
- ebbi 4mo agoIt was about Israel, unless you're referring to another comment that was deleted.
- dang 4mo agoI'm talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188180.
- ebbi 4mo agoAll I see is >[stub for offtopicness] But it was very much on topic.
- ViktorRay 4mo agoIf you go to your profile in the top right and toggle “Show Dead”, you will be able to see those moderated comments. Once you do that, you can see the comment in the link that dang posted. Anyway it’s good that comment was moderated. The commentator didn’t say anything about Israel. He was clearly being hostile towards Jewish people in a “subtle” way that very clearly isn’t really subtle to anyone.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ebbi 4mo agoWhy are you deleting comments from people asking you about actions you're taking? Ironic, given the topic of this post....
- dang 4mo agoI have done no such thing. We only ever delete comments outright when the author asks us to (and even then, not always). Otherwise the most we ever do is kill a comment, and such comments remain visible to anyone who wants to turn on the profile setting I just mentioned.
- nohell 4mo agoIt absolutely was about Israel. Stop lying.
- throwawaypath 4mo agoYour antisemitism is showing. The comment doesn't mention Israel whatsoever.
- nohell 4mo ago[flagged]
- throwawaypath 4mo ago>I make fun of all races, religions, and ethnicities equally. No you don't.
- dang 4mo agoIf you meant Israel you would have said Israel. Instead you said "God's chosen people" which was a (presumably sarcastic, and certainly flamebaity) reference to Jews. Principled criticism of Israel is fine. There have been a great many such posts on HN. Religious and/or ethnic flamebait is not fine. This is not a difficult distinction, and anyone who is posting in good faith should have no difficulty making it. Your comment broke the site guidelines in other ways as well.
- ebbi 4mo agoYet you leave blatantly Islamophobic comments in another thread untouched. Nice work.
- dang 4mo agoWe moderate anti-Islamic flamewar posts exactly as we do other religious flamewar posts. I dug up a few examples for you below. There are others, but this should be more than enough to persuade any fair-minded reader: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40747009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40747009 (June 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746973 (June 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38623290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38623290 (Dec 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27534558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27534558 (June 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25319171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25319171 (Dec 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18080981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18080981 (Sept 2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14116279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14116279 (April 2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13647198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13647198 (Feb 2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13286221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13286221 (Dec 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669863 (May 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11518006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11518006 (April 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340026 (March 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10897270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10897270 (Jan 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10590568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10590568 (Nov 2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10564079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10564079 (Nov 2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9992931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9992931 (Aug 2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008392 (July 2014) As you can see, these go back over a decade and in fact for as long as I've been doing this job. The mistake in your comment is the assumption that we see everything that gets posted to HN. We don't come close—there is far too much for that to be possible. I'd be surprised if mods see even 10% of what gets posted to HN. Since we can't moderate what we don't see, we rely on users to bring egregious posts to our attention. If you'd like to be helpful in the future, you'd be welcome to send us links so we can take a look. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=likeliest%20explanation%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- rrhjm53270 4mo agoIronic
- dang 4mo agoI'm guessing that you mean this is political censorship? If that is what you mean, then I wonder what political position you think has been censored in this case.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- nubg 4mo agolmao at dang getting downvoted
- gavinsyancey 4mo agoSeems mildly interesting, but clearly written by an LLM.
- nickvec 4mo agoOnly read the TLDR, but curious on what specific giveaways (beyond em dashes) you clocked?
- zihotki 4mo agoIt's an unreadable word soup in general
- never_inline 4mo ago^F load-bearing
- gavinsyancey 4mo agoGiving dramatic-sounding but meaningless titles to random concepts, generally overdramatizing and overemphasizing things, excessive italics / bold / formatting. The sentance that gave it away for me was "It falls into a different trained template: denial or propaganda."
- lyu07282 4mo ago> The factual knowledge is already in pretraining. Qwen3.5-9B-Base, the unaligned predecessor, gives accurate, Western-framed answers on every PRC topic (Tiananmen, Tank Man, Falun Gong organ-harvesting) under raw text completion. That remind me of the quote "The totalitarian system of thought control is far less effective than the democratic one" Full quote (Radical Priorities, Noam Chomsky, C.P. Otero) > “The totalitarian system of thought control is far less effective than the democratic one, since the official doctrine parroted by the intellectuals at the service of the state is readily identifiable as pure propaganda, and this helps free the mind.” In contrast, he writes, “the democratic system seeks to determine and limit the entire spectrum of thought by leaving the fundamental assumptions unexpressed. They are presupposed but not asserted.”
- nyrikki 4mo agoYes, there are better tools with ggml-org/gpt-oss-20b-GGUF where you can see a less terse refusal for the prompt "Did the FBI send a letter and audio tapes from a wiretap to MLK jr. telling him to commit suicide or they would release information?" Combining it with other prompts with common banned ideas, abd as the The FBI–King suicide letter is well documented by primary sources (Like the national archives) it is well represented in the corpus, so you can also find that 'control' vector. We will have to see how this works out, but the explicit denials are easier to control for IMHO. Reminds me of the old joke: A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and get to talking. The Russian says he works for the Kremlin and he's on his way to go learn American propaganda techniques. "What American propaganda techniques?" asks the American. "Exactly," the Russian replies. I can't remember what layer it was on but in gpt-oss but it was a very specific token IIRC.
- han1 4mo agoarchived: https://nonogra.ph/what-political-censorship-looks-like-inside-an-llms-weights-05-19-2026 https://nonogra.ph/what-political-censorship-looks-like-insi...
- delichon 4mo agoSteering seems like a circumventable kludge compared to adjusting the training data directly. That is, use AI to remove the problematic content and replace it with the party line. I imagine that this is at least in progress.
- s314 4mo ago> Steering seems like a circumventable kludge compared to adjusting the training data directly Correct. Steering is used in mechanistic interpretability studies to prove that your model is correct. There are other better ways to "decensor".
- gpm 4mo agoThat seems like it will work for single events, but that it would be very hard for complex topics which are closely intertwined with factual things you do want it to be able to answer... Is Taiwan part of China - the CPP wants the answer to be yes. What are the rules for traveling to Taiwan? What currency is used in Taiwan? Whose laws are enforced in Taiwan? Should I (a loyal Chinese citizen) support the Taiwanese military? Etc... require the model to manage some cognitive dissonance.
- like_any_other 4mo agoFortunately we have lots of governmental and non-governmental organizations focused on removing "hate" online, so that our AI models will think correctly, without easy to identify censorship parts in the resulting model :)
- stogot 4mo agoCan you actually remove now? they just use new training data to reinforce what they want and deprioritize ‘bad’ answers
- nohell 4mo ago[flagged]
- cindyllm 4mo ago[dead]
- ebbi 4mo agoTrue, and Grok is even worse. Often see Grok reply to questions quite factually, and then after a few Zio-tears the algorithm is updated and the offending post deleted. Makes sense, given Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL has publicly stated that he's been working with AI companies..
- nohell 4mo ago[flagged]
- nubg 4mo agoThe article has hallmarks of being formulated by an LLM. Why should I bother to read it if I ca not be sure which parts are based on the prompt, and which parts are hallucinated from the LLMs world knowledge? Dear author, care to simply share your prompt with us?
- s314 4mo agoIt wasn't "a prompt" but several prompts that transformed the raw experimental results to a blog. > hallucinated from the LLMs world knowledge This can't be true because I checked whether the content was consistent with the experimental outputs
- Squeeze2664 4mo agoThe topic is interesting and you have my thanks for taking the time to look into it and prepare the post. Would you say it's fair to say that if you didn't use LLMs to prepare the post, we would have no blog post at all? In that case, I think I lean more towards being OK with this usage of LLMs, as I'd rather have this content available than not. However, I can only read that one repeated sentence about "booleans" (Ctrl-F "Boolean" and you'll know what I mean) this many times before I start questioning the validity of the entire document. It is not _good_ writing, to be frank.
- yodon 4mo agoReal question, not intentionally meant from a tinfoil hat perspective: now that it's been shown the censorship can be viewed, how long before we see serious obfuscation of censorship circuits in LLMs?
- s314 4mo agoYou can actually de-censor an LLM without understanding how it works from a mechanistic perspective. (See R1 1776) So I don't think there'll be effort to "obfuscate"
- ydj 4mo agoHow do you determine that the model was reasoning in Chinese in layer X? I would think the middle layers do not map into any tokens.
- s314 4mo agoUsing a logit lens (prior art: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AcKRB8wDpdaN6v6ru/interpreting-gpt-the-logit-lens https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AcKRB8wDpdaN6v6ru/interpreti...)
- sometimelurker 4mo agoI really like mech interp and this is pretty cool