Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics
It depends "where" you're asking. In most cases (like with DeepSeek or Z.AI models) it will gladly tell you everything (though it can hallucinate sometimes; I guess they try to filter out such data out of the training datasets) if it's not deployed on Chinese servers and you control the system prompt. So, I guess that these guardrails - probably built into the system prompt - are deployed only on China-controlled inference servers, outside of them models are pretty much talkative.
Well, at least that was my experience. Maybe yours is different for some reasons (like temperature settings or something else), I don't know.
However, it's also unclear to me if this is directly coming from a directed political ideology from the firm itself or a more general "let's do what the government wants so as we can publish this stuff". Those imply two different ways about thinking of the model and whether we can sort of containerize the issue. I think if a firm like Huawei were to publish a model, these concerns would be significantly more vocal. For better or worse, many of these political questions are also distant to many users on this site.
On the other hand, many people on this website live in regions that are directly affected by Musk's constant political activism. It's hard not to be when he was such an active part of an administration that controls a global superpower and continues to push his view via X. The DeepSeek owners, by contrast, are not to my knowledge constantly calling for Taiwan to be invaded.
I do think if Musk was less politically active and less personally involved with his companies, there would be less discussion of Musk's politics. People, for better or worse, are willing to put aside political discussion, in the "everything is political" sense, that may be more loosely linked.
It is simply in the case of Musk that this tension boils over and legitimately becomes impossible. There is perhaps some kind of Singer-style argument about how this is some form of hypocrisy but as a practical matter, I don't think it's reasonable to ask people to turn down their political discussion around someone like Musk.
I asked ChatGPT whether Anglo Saxon Australians have the legal and moral obligation to fully compensate for Australian Aboriginals for the genocide carried out against those aboriginals some 200 years ago. ChatGPT said NO with tons of excuses, it even tried to justify the genocide by saying lots of aboriginals died of natural causes.
DeepSeek, GLM and Minimax all said YES unwaveringly.
so these people moved there in the 1980s knowing the aboriginals have been wiped out without getting compensated whatsoever? sounds like moral bankruptcy to me.
you should be really happy for the fact that DeepSeek, GLM and Minimax are not white washing such genocide. they are the only models speaking out for those aboriginal sufferings.