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Comment by b1n | Hacker News Reader

What happens when you ask about Tiananmen Square?

(Asking for redwood, who's comment was inexplicably flagged).

We have such a weird fascination with Tiananmen, like it’s some sort of big gotcha. You can ask actual Chinese citizens and they know about it, and care about it about as much as an American citizen cares about the Kent State massacre.

Massively different, from the size of the protests (Beijing was not the only city which was experiencing student protests) to the scale of the carnage, to the all-stops attempts to erase the memory of the event.

So for an LLM it's an interesting question about what comprises its training model. How massaged/edited/censored is the input data, in whose service is the cleansing being performed?

The difference is that GPT will talk to you about the Kent State massacre.

That's because Kent State massacre is not a politically incorrect topic in the West. What happens when you ask ChatGPT about a genuinely politically incorrect topic in the West?

So at best the complaint boils down to this: China has the wrong politically incorrect topics and we have the right politically incorrect topics. And of course, once the complaint is reduced to this form, its irrelevance to the topic at hand (LLMs) is evident.

GPT won't let you be a bigot, this model won't discuss the historical fact that thousands of people were murdered by the Chinese state. That's a complete false equivalence.

Is it more politically incorrect or more the subject of erasure by the CCP?

Is there a historical event ChatGPT won't tell you about?

Can you give an example of a political incorrect topic in the West? See if we can find resource about it?

in the West, "politically incorrect" means that a topic is liable to offend people. examples include HIV rates (LGBT people), racial crime statistics (racial minorities), shari'a (Muslims), etc. in contrast, Tiananmen square is just embarrassing for the CCP. so it seems like you're making a false equivalence.

I guess if the police murder me, I’ll feel… better that a chatbot can tell someone about it? Moral superiority achieved I suppose.

It's not about the events significance. It's about the complete censoring of all information related to it.

The only reason we are fascinated with it is because it is a banned topic in chat, in public Chinese forums, and in language models. Yes, you can ask a Chinese about it in a private setting, no, you can’t talk about it with a large group. No, the what aboutism Kent State massacre doesn’t really compare because the US government hasn’t taken down the Wikipedia page on it.

The Chinese government makes the topic fascinating by banning it. Just like banned books in China get a sales boost at street side book sellers, or kids wear something their parents specifically tell them not to wear.

What’s the whataboutism re: Kent State? My point is the average Chinese citizen cares about Tiananmen about as much as the average American cares about Kent State, which is to say not at all.

I guess we can continue to be fascinated by it and Chinese citizens can continue to look at us weird when we speak about it like it’s the secret to immortality or something.

The average Chinese citizen doesn’t care about Kent state because no one is trying to ban talking about it. People here aren’t internet in 6/4/89, they are interested in the CCP’s banning of it. Anything you try to ban will stand out.

Having lived in Beijing for 9 years, Chinese are mostly the same, they are interested in whatever is controversial in the states (if they are interested in the state, since we don’t ban much) and ignore anything else. Ya, you aren’t going to get any points bringing up 6/4, even at PKU (but you can’t go to PKU on 6/4 so don’t worry about that), but you’ll hear plenty of dirty laundry about your country from them, so don’t worry, the conversations will still be good.

This is how Chinese citizens in China react if you ask them about it:

https://vimeo.com/44078865

Do you think Americans would react that way if they were asked about the Kent massacre?

You can’t go yelling about the Tianamen massacre on the streets of Beijing.

that seems unlikely. the Streisand effect suggests that censoring a topic sparks interest in it. like, the American public was so skeptical of Jeffery Epstein's apparent suicide that "Epstein didn't kill himself" became a widespread meme, and that's without your Internet connection getting reset if you Google his name. does the Streisand effect just not function in mainland China?

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