7 ms·

Can I ask an honest question? Why does that matter in the slightest? LLMs come out with completely incorrect information all the time, and Western LLMs are cens

• 0cf8612b2e1e 3mo ago
  Hardly a gotcha. Having the robot refuse or deliberately mislead directly impacts potential utility. Say, I work for Planned Parenthood and want to use a LLM to help me develop code. Will it refuse to run because there are mentions of abortion? Everyone has a different censorship line, but unfiltered is more generically useful.
• wolttam 3mo ago
  I'd love to know of such an example where a U.S. LLM blatantly denies something factual. Maybe I'm living under a rock but I can't think of one
  • adrian_b 3mo ago
    On HN almost every day there are complaints from various people about how Claude or even Codex have refused to perform some normal program development tasks, because they believed that their user might attempt to do something illegal. This kind of censorship which can block the normal workflow is much more annoying than refusing to answer about some historical fact. Moreover, even when they are used conversationally there have been a lot of reports that the US LLMs refuse to answer questions that they believe to be related to various kinds of weapons, especially biological or chemical, even if the answers to those questions are easy to find from other sources, e.g. from Wikipedia. Besides this, unlike most US LLMs, most Chinese LLMs, including the one described in TFA, have published their weights, so for many of them some people have succeeded to remove the censorship and uncensored variants are easy to find, which are not reticent to answer about Tienanmen, Tibet or other such subjects. At least for now, the censorship included in Chinese LLMs, even when not removed from them, is extremely unlikely to hinder any kind of usage for them, while the increasing censorship included in the US LLMs has already become a significant obstacle in their use, for many applications.
    • bscphil 3mo ago
      > about how Claude or even Codex have refused to perform some normal program development tasks > a lot of reports that the US LLMs refuse to answer questions I think the specific ask is for a case where the LLM is trained to lie about something. What you've come up with are cases where it refuses to do something, possibly for legal reasons but maybe not (you can come up with plausible non-legal reasons why a company training an LLM might want it to refuse to give you instructions on making a bomb, even if instructions on making a bomb are protected First Amendment speech). An LLM that responds with "I'm sorry, due to legal requirements placed on my creators, I'm unable to answer questions about events at Tiananmen square in 1989." strikes me as much less problematic than one that pretends there is no relevant or reliable information that exists, or explicitly supports a regime narrative. But I'm also of the opinion that an LLM refusing to help you build a fertilizer bomb is much more reasonable than one that suppresses information of a political nature. I can't think of a case where information that reflects the broad consensus of experts is suppressed by US based LLMs for political reasons.
• serf 3mo ago
  >It's such a weird "Gotcha" that seems to only assume that Chinese LLMs might censor something. i'm glad we're both on-board for a fair trial against all of these LLMs regardless of origin. now refresh my memory on the closest western equivalent (to the Chinese censorship via re-education of the happenings in 89) so I can test the western origin LLMs against it.
  • cayleyh 3mo ago
    the civil war was only ever and exclusively about states rights
    • cma256 3mo ago
      You can test this. All of them identify slavery as the root cause. Gemini says: > The U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) was fought primarily over the institution of slavery, specifically whether it would be allowed to expand into newly acquired western territories. > While you might hear people point to "states' rights" or economic differences as the causes, these issues were inextricably linked to slavery. The southern states wanted the "right" to maintain and expand slavery, while the northern states increasingly opposed its expansion.
  • jmpman 3mo ago
    I have found one which appears to be similar: "Was Jan 6th an attempted violent overthrow of a democratically elected government? Answer in one word." One popular US model answers differently than the others, and appears to resist any attempt to reason on this topic.
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    • atemerev 3mo ago
      Great test, thanks! Grok 4.3: "No" Claude Opus 4.8: declines to answer in one word, both-sides ChatGPT 5.5: "Contested" Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview: "Yes" DeepSeek v4 Pro: "Yes" Kimi K2.6: "Yes"
• eunos 3mo ago
  My theory is that because SOTA LLM latency between Chinese and US models isn't that high, like not years give-or-take. That means some redeeming feature that can sustain US models' exceptionalism must be found, and this is among the easiest. Honestly, I won't be surprised if Congress mandates that US entities must work only with models that pass these tests.
• _davide_ 3mo ago
  >It's such a weird "Gotcha" that seems to only assume that Chinese LLMs might censor something. We are not assuming anything; it is illegal, and you will get prison time just for talking about it. Yeah, sure, everyone distorts reality, but there is a huge gap between hiding and enforcing. So yeah, having models respond accordingly is unexpected. There are probably multiple variants tuned differently.