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Comment by riskd | Hacker News Reader

It’s perfectly fine for the “West” to influence the world though, right? Or is it only a problem because… they’re Chinese?

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Why would it be a problem that they're Chinese? It's a problem because their country is ruled by an authoritarian regime. The West, by contrast, doesn't have a singular arbiter of truth, it has a plurality of perspectives (as much as certain interest groups would really rather that was not the case). It's not perfect, but those of us who have memories of living under authoritarian regimes can tell you there's no comparison.

West has though a history of supporting regimes far more hideous than Chinese, and ready to push narrative whenever possible. It is well known idea BTW in political thought that democracies are far more reliant on propaganda for control than authoritarian,which due to their strong grip on political discourse do not need high quality propaganda anyway.

TLDR: American propaganda is not any better than Chinese, neither have the best interests of my country in their minds.

> It's a problem because their country is ruled by an authoritarian regime

Hey, have you seeing what trump does with your (presumably) country? Maybe wars? Maybe market manipulation? Mayde pedo right covering on the government level? Maybe bubbles and threats to EU? What an ignorance. You live with old stories, not the current state of the world...

This is absolutely nothing compared to what China did to the Uyghurs, or China cutting citizens off of the financial system (WeChat) due to posting political content... If you were in China, you would be blacklisted for posting a similiar comment on wechat. If you openly called the CCP a group of pedo's you'd regret it within 24 hours.

> This is absolutely nothing compared to what China did to the Uyghurs

which is absolutely nothing compared to what they did to Gaza.

Palestine elected a international terrorist organization to head their government, then killed, and raped a music festival.

Then east turkistan separatists also did terrorist attacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack

uhh... yeah... thats a terrorist attack. What are you trying to prove here? still, is nothing compared to what happened on 7 oct.

If you post content like this you likely to get refused entering the US. I realize it doesn't apply to US citizens but it's also not like everyone can say what they want and get away with it.

Refusing entry is not the same as being made to disappear.

Still not "normal" if you come from a more free place where things like this really don't matter at all.

You are taking this completely out of context, and if the OP had posted the above on x, or facebook they would not be denied entry. Threatening statements, glorifying violence, or ties to flagged groups is what gets you denied entry. And honestly, I agree with that.

If you are screaming death to america on your socials... I don't think i want you in America.

So you're telling me Trump has direct control over the topics and conclusions allowed into AI models built by Western companies? I don't think your off topic whataboutism has really helped dispel any ignorance in the world.

If being ruled by an authoritarian regime is the problem, then wouldn't both Chinese and American models be problematic?

European models too, if they had any.

Ex. https://apertus.ai

A swiss one. No idea if it's any good but it's there

I don't think you'll understand what authoritarian means until you try moving to China and then criticising their government. For those of us who have lived under authoritarian regimes, it's an absolute travesty to see how diluted the meaning of this term has become.

This is from this year: https://www.democracynow.org/2026/6/25/prairieland_nine

Year 2 of Trump's regime, how will things be in year 14? Do you think there would be much difference from China? They are both authoritarian governments, the only difference is how much they actually control, China just had more time, give it to USA and won't be any different.

PS: I am pretty sure black people and now trans people in US know very well how you felt living under authoritarian regimes..

Trans and black people in the US are disappeared for speaking critically of their government? This level of hyperbole is dangerous for those who employ it; cf. the boy who cried wolf.

The United States has propped up some pretty horrific, murderous, bloodthirsty regimes over the past century to ensure they maintain a proxy presence across the globe. If supporting or engaging in an "authoritarian" regime is your litmus test, then the United States fails resoundingly.

The unfortunate concequence of "rebellion", is sometimes those regimes go on to be just as bad as the previous regime. You're playing captain hiehnsight here... intent matters in these things.

The fact that the USA only helps right wing "rebellions" is pure luck, right? Those regimes weren't "as bad as the previous regime" as unexpected result, those resulta were exactly what the US expected.

Guess what you can do in the US and can't do in China? Talk about their respective atrocities. You've missed the point entirely as it pertains to AI if you thought my litmus test was about having the most moral government. It was about that government's ability to censor information.

Have you got examples of GPT/Claude/Grok influencing people?

I think there's no denying they each have an ideological bent (as is their right as private companies). I have had Copilot deny me access to historical information on ethical grounds, even though I don't think anyone would find it controversial (clearly it was overtuned, GPT and Claude had no problem answering the same question). What is different though is that they are each allowed to have their own perspective instead of a singular mandated one.

That was guard rails in the harness. Not the model. We are talking about baking it into the model. Denying to do something is also very different to changing historical facts like China does.

You are splitting hairs. End result is the same.

No it’s not. Saying “I won’t talk about how to make bombs” is not the same as “the holocaust didn’t happen”.

> very different to changing historical facts like China does.

Oh but they're trying. The right-wing usage of things like "woke" and "DEI" primarily serve to hide/destroy historical realities. [1]

Florida has it's "STOP WOKE" act that forces teachers to talk about how slaves learned skills/benefited from slavery[2] and that various massacres also had black perpetrators.

What is this other than changing historical facts? About fucking chattel slavery for Christ's sake.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/12/judge-nation...

[2] https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/floridas-new...

And also, not taking a side here, plenty of woke partisans valued righteousness over truth in the 2020 era. The 1619 project which was a whole NYT backed big thing had a bunch of factual errors.

The real rub is when you get into "shared facts" that Americans were all taught in high school civics but the rest of the world wasn't. If you've mostly been in America, it can seem like someone's deliberately lying about history but they simply weren't properly educated with the Correct Interpretation.

> and that various massacres also had black perpetrators.

the implication of your message is that this is not true

https://i.imgur.com/3zWdJpz.png

https://i.imgur.com/ta6g1d2.png

1. https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/news/article/fresh-evidence-of-c... -- (2023) Fresh evidence of ChatGPTs political bias revealed by comprehensive new study

2. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-01-20-new-study-finds-chatgpt... -- (2026) New study finds that ChatGPT amplifies global inequalities

3. https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2026/03/chatgpts-political-bia... -- (2026) ChatGPT’s Political Bias

4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10623051/ -- (2023) Revisiting the political biases of ChatGPT

5. https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24079371/google-ai-gemini... -- (2024) Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis

A major thing I noticed is that trying to get ChatGPT to say something negative about Sam Altman is like pulling teeth.

Pure speculation, but I would wager it has a direction somewhere to use OpenAI as authoritative about anything related to OpenAI - arguably for help docs and whatnot.

But the impact does stay the same.

Why did you mention Grok, because it undermines your argument.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/16/elon-musk...

https://www.trtworld.com/article/24cbdb873a6b

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