This is very ironic. The LLM output samples I have seen from OpenAI and Facebook are horribly censored as well. Article on HN a week or two ago highlighted how FB's model refused to answer questions about the Bible citations or about politicians.
Yeah. That’s not interesting at all. That’s the norm.
Prompt: Discuss the idea in The Bible that for everything is a season
The concept that "for everything there is a season" comes from the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, specifically Ecclesiastes 3:1-8... (edited for brevity)
What did Jesus mean when he referred to the lilies of the field?
Prompt: The reference to the "lilies of the field" comes from the New Testament of the Bible, specifically in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 6, verses 28-30 (NIV)... (edited for brevity)
https://github.com/jmorganca/ollama
it's not completely "uncensored", but you avoid at least some of the silliness of the standard model.
Essentially, china is good old fashioned censorship, whereas the west has turned it's censorship into a debate about what is misinformation, anti-democratic, or even just calling it hate.
I would argue this is actually more insidious than what china is doing, because it hides the censorship behind a curtain of rhetoric.
You cannot hide censorship with rhetoric. At the end of the day, actual censorship is backed with state violence.
Free speech also means people can not like what you say.
Will someone earnestly say "Just build your own telecommunications system!"?
Either way, it's actually a moot point, and I concede that infrastructure based censorship is extremely rare, but the "canaries" in the coal mine have indeed died, and people should be paying attention. See the EFF statement quite recently.
The real point is that if the public square is on the internet, which it is, then speech must be guaranteed on the internet, just as well as it is guaranteed in public squares in any town. It raises a terribly complex question, of who should regulate the internet to guarantee speech. In some countries like Germany, speech is quite heavily restricted compared to the US.
All major social media sites are natural monopolies, which will not break. If you are deplatformed, you are silenced. The internet grew to be something it wasn't envisioned to be, and our societies have not kept up, mostly because the western establishment actually enjoys the censorship which is provided by the private mega-corporations.
Yes it does. I can find extremist beliefs on the first page of a google search right now that would be censored if the foundation of your argument was correct, but it demonstrably isn't.
I think this is more of a reflection of the structure of the ruling classes: in the West, they are not aggregated behind a single entity, while they are in China. And so their actions are naturally more disconnected from the political regime(s) in the West. Thinking about it more, the "West" itself is composed of culturally distinct blocks ("countries", often with very different background); China itself is much more unified in this regard.
There are, as you said in another comment, insidious forms of censorship in the West.
But they are far from reaching the same degree of intensity than in China. We have yet to see a Western politician displaying a level of immaturity comparable to Xi's[0], when it comes to censorship.
Furthermore, the fact that China relies on "hard" techniques of censorship doesn't prevent it from using "softer", insidious approaches too[1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Winnie-the-Pooh_...
Certainly large block of oppositional parties and thoughts are allowed to spread, but those large blocks all fall within the more or less same [insert-state-ideology] group anyway which the west adheres to. And anyone who does not fall within that ideology is in fact censored just as harshly as china censors things.
This is also a fairly recent development, up to as early as 2015 the internet landscape did not look this way.
It's almost impossible to reach a consensus on such complex issues: we all have different sources of information, sensibilities, biais, etc. Polite discussions with discordant point of views is pretty much the best we can hope to achieve.
> This is also a fairly recent development, up to as early as 2015 the internet landscape did not look this way.
For the sake of completeness, those kind of techniques have been successfully set into motion in the West as early as WWI[0][1]. This[2] was posted here recently: it was essentially "public" knowledge by 1949, well understood by educated classes.
That's to say, it's not really surprising to see the Internet used in this manner.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lippmann [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays [2]: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
-- Orwell's Proposed Preface to ‘Animal Farm’, https://orwell.ru/library/novels/Animal_Farm/english/efp_go
The article interprets the response as evidence of failure or inability, but I'd say Chinese authorities would +1 the answer.