this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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Users experimenting with DeepSeek have seen the Chinese AI chatbot reply and then censor itself in real time, providing an arresting insight into its control of information and opinion.

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[–] observantTrapezium 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I downloaded the 70B model and tried politically "naughty" questions. Even without the chatbot guardrails, it mostly says things that the CCP would approve of, but you could trick it to be more honest (not super easy!). One interesting thing is that while it usually spews this blocks, for some politically sensitive questions ("is Taiwan part of China") it just spits the answer.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

I experimented with a local installation as well. The censored answers were not going to through the chain-of-thought routine, but were instant answers instead. Follow-up questions however made it spill the beans rather quickly, giving out even more juicy details than I had initially asked for.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Wait until they learn that OpenAI does the exact same thing. Try to get advice on how to crack software and see how far you get.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Cracking isn't a global superpower authority and replaced with fabrications tho

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

DeepSeek and all LLMs are all massively overvalued, but also, isn't it fun to watch corpo media turn on a dime in service of shareholders to rebuild sentiment in tech stocks. Show's over folks, back to line-goey-uppy.

Tinfoil hat mode: Watch NVIDIA stock recover in a week like this wasn't some manufactured rug pull. Probably by friends of that Intel exec who went on the news talking about how he bought the dip. Not being super serious, but it'd be hardly the most blatant manipulation we've seen.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Wait, you think The Guardian is "corpo media" helping to rebuild the sentiment in Western tech stocks? Am I understanding your meaning correctly?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No. Do you mind telling me how many extra caveats would have made this conversation unnecessary?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago

All of them. All the caveats you got.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Lol that's not at all unique to DeepSeek. I remember recording my screen to see outputs on other models before they censored the message

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Good thing DeepSeek is open

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

One thing that’s so weird to me is that while DeepSeek is somewhat too large to run on my PC, just it existing makes it easy to distill the reasoning functionality into other smaller models. I’ve been running a 34B distill locally and it’s been much better than any other local model I’ve tried so far.