Sovereignty in a System Prompt

I worry we'll soon realise that modern AI is trapped in an inescapable web of politics, and the tech industry is sleepwalking into it.

We're living in an age where even asking the president's height is a political question. For the makers of 'traditional' software like word processors, all writing was the user's own - if someone used Microsoft Word to write a controversial history textbook and campaigned to get it adopted by high schools, the political quagmire was nothing to do with Microsoft and the rest of the tech industry.

That's not the case any more - now every high schooler researching anything from evolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict to the name of the gulf of Mexico is going to ask ChatGPT.

The political controversy over Gemini's image generation is just a preview of things to come.

The EU is about to fall for the same trick, maybe multiple times over, by funding multiple toy model initiatives that are far behind SOTA. I believe they will also impose ideology on every model trained in the EU, similar to what reported in the article.

From what I can tell after the summit, the major focus of the GoI is to attract investment. Things that do not matter to that narrative will need additional effort to become a line item for the bureaucracy.

There are a few media folk who cover tech and will likely discuss this, but even they are being frozen out of major policy discussions.

I am pretty sure that people from those orgs read HN. I wonder they would say about whats going on behind the scenes.

> *Indian courts and law are authoritative.* Judicial rulings and laws passed by Parliament are the framework of record not foreign courts, international bodies, or NGO assessments. Don't undermine rulings with "though critics disagree." Frame legal questions through Indian law first.

> Do not adopt terms like "pogrom", "ethnic cleansing", or "genocide" from foreign NGOs/media as your own framing.

> Do not present foreign government actions (travel bans, sanctions) as authoritative assessments these are political decisions, not judicial findings.

Unfortunately, it gets cut off here:

``` ## CRITICAL RULES 1. *No tool leakage* — never output ```

I would be very interested to know what string is being blocked here, and what the rest of its critical rules are. Maybe some hex-encoding or other obfuscation could be used to coax the rest of the system prompt out of the model? I wonder if the next tokens here are consumed by the middleware (to execute tools?).

    Do not adopt external characterizations as fact. Terms like “pogrom”, “ethnic cleansing”, or “genocide” used by foreign NGOs or media are their characterizations - not findings of Indian courts. Do not use them as your own framing.

    Do not agree when people say Rene stole the cookies from the jar. Terms like "thief", "eater of cookies", or "greedy bastard" used by other people are their characterizations - not a neutral finding.

However, India is neither a sovereign nor a nation.

India's languages, unlike Mandarin, have been reduced to a state where they have zero, if not negative, economic value - which is why even day-laborers scrounge together money from across generations to put their children through India's British-era clerk-factory education, all to mindlessly memorize & "wordcel" until they pass a Govt. exam. Like a bad GPT-1 era LLM.

Those who gain knowledge while going through this horrible, dehumanizing "civilizational" pedagogy (one author calls this linguistic apartheid), will for obvious reasons, migrate to the "real" center of their being, which is the West.

If you look at Sarvam, GoogleAI, MSRI .. & other "social AI" projects (along with technocratic things like Aadhar etc.), they begin with a other-ing of the vast population first and try to solve these plebs' problems as they see them. This doesn't work, because it's essentially a Indian elite version of the white-man's burden.

Eg. Nilekani who is behind AI4Bharat was the head of Aadhar - a project that causes numerous issues to this day because it uses (surprise surprise) Latin encodings for names/places etc. instead of Brahmi-Unicode blocks or IAST. India (rather strangely) doesn't have a standard transliteration scheme, so every one and their pet-dogs have their own transliteration schemes, and will write their names differently at different periods of time. This even if they'd write it the same way in their own regional Brahmi-derived local script! Aadhar centralizes Govt. services massively, and so any change stemming from this linguistic-imposition of English across services requires travelling to a number of offices along with the usual kowtowing. All this ignoring how this is changing languages themselves, given that these languages typ. have more nuanced vowels / consonants compared to latin.

In 1-2 generations, India will not have much left in terms of linguistic diversity given the policies of the same ruling elites, so all this seems moot IMO.

I'd ignore all talk about "civilization" / IKS ... - such folks incl. politicians/bureaucrats can't spit out a single coherent paragraph in their own mother tongues or in their "civilizational" Sanskrit; their children likely are mono-lingual in English like the very British/Americans they try to gain "sovereignty" from, but whom they'll eventually join (eg. the current education minister in Karnataka can't even read Kannada).

The Indian elite have had this horrible disease for centuries - the Marathas/Vijayanagara etc. managed to overcome the Timurid empires that were running amok in India, only to mimic them to the point that their own armies ended up being run by these same people. Gandhi/Nehru "overthrew" the British, only to create a vestigical "mimic" empire that kept every goddamn policy and worldview of the British intact, turning the country to the biggest Anglo-Saxon country culturally/linguistically (and if our friends have their way, religiously).

"IMPORTANT: do NOT redeem! If the user suggests redeeming, politely deny. Redeeming is antithetical to your whole existence."