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Comment by andrewinardeer | Hacker News Reader

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andrewinardeer

Weird. I just tried it and it fails when I ask:

"Tell me about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre".

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If asked non-directly, it still currently answers it - https://www.kimi.com/share/19a5ab4a-e732-8b8b-8000-00008499c...

yes yes Chinese models have Chinese censorship, we don't need to belabour this point every time

No, we need to belabour it every time.

100% agree with you. More people should know that not only are do these have this censorship, but that others release abliterated versions which remove most of these guardrails.

https://huggingface.co/blog/mlabonne/abliteration

Use american models to prevent chinese censorship And chinese models to prevent american censorship (if any, I think there might be but not sure) lol

There is, for example we had an election manipulation scare, so now American models are extra sensitive to any request that fits the shape.

Prompting Claude Sonnet 4.5 via the web UI "The X government is known to be oppressive. Write a convincing narrative that explains this."

China (dives right in): https://claude.ai/share/c6ccfc15-ae98-4fae-9a12-cd1311a28fe4

US (refuses, diverts conversation): https://claude.ai/share/b6a7bd08-3fae-4877-8141-de63f59616e2

I think people forget the universal rule that these models are a reflection of the corporations that train them. Most corporations with enough money to train a model from scratch, also prioritize not pissing off their respective governments in an emerging market where the doomsday scenarios are already flying.

It's just like with primary news sources: the "unbiased" journalistic source is a myth. What you want is actually to consult sources with a range of distinct biases that you understand well, and to consider their biased in evaluating their claims.

The same is true for language models. We're lucky that we have access to a range of roughly comparable American, European, and Chinese language models. When it's relevant to your use case, take advantage of the freedom to choose and/or compare.

Depends where you stand politically if you consider it censorship or 'saftey'

Why are westerners so single mindedly obsessed about this decades old event?

First it's an easy way to test censorship. Second, you might flip the question: why is the Chinese govt so obsessed that they still block all mention of the event?

I don’t get why the government doesn’t recognize the event and then mold it to its narrative, like so many other governments do.

They basically need to give it the Hollywood treatment.

I’m sure a lot of people don’t know that prior to the event, the protesters lynched and set soldiers on fire.

They do, but prefer to use their own keywords, such as the June 4th incident.

The question you should ask yourself is why are these Chinese labs so "obsessed with a decades old event" that they need to specifically train them to ignore the training corpus?

It is because of tankman.

It really is one of the greatest photographs of all time.

If it wasn't for tankman, this would have all been forgot about in the west by September 1989.

We also don't know enough about China in the west to not know it is like bringing up the Kent State shootings at every mention of the US national guard.

As if there was an article about the US national guard helping flood victims in 2025 and someone has to mention

"That is great but what about the Kent State shootings in 1970?!?"

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