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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

> What does it matter if they weren't developed in France or the UK if the average French or English person can download and run them locally? And if countries need a big AI of their own, for whatever odd reason, they can work out a deal with Moonshot and run audited instances of K3 on their .gov networks.

The loud voices here seem to mostly worry about models getting "censored".

I think people should worry a little more about models being trained to propagandise party lines and national interests, so for China the non-independence of Taiwan and "re-education camp is totally not a euphemism, there are no human rights abuses" and "all these Chinese corporations and stock markets are 100% compatible with Marxism-Leninism honest" and "you silly Europeans and Americans, stop worrying and open your markets to our businesses".

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> worry a little more about models being trained to propagandise party lines and national interests

I'd be a little more worried about this if every single traditional media wasn't already outputting propaganda for party lines and a very particular version of the "national interest". The difference between China and America to third parties seems to come down to whether you also want a leader who's rude about you very publicly in English on social media.

> I'd be a little more worried about this if every single traditional media wasn't already outputting propaganda for party lines and a very particular version of the "national interest".

It's the same idea, to be sure. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

> The difference between China and America to third parties seems to come down to whether you also want a leader who's rude about you very publicly in English on social media.

Aye.

I am slightly worried by the possibility that European nations and people are treating the Trump-China dilemma as "better the devil you know than the devil you don't".

You can give custom instructions to a model like K3 when you host it locally.

Besides, if the government of France is working out a deal to host a model like K3 as a sort of "Government Service AI," they'd surely need to pay, and they'd likely be able to work out a deal where sensitive political issues are resolved in a way that doesn't embarrass either party.

> You can give custom instructions to a model like K3 when you host it locally.

It is unclear if that would be sufficient to circumvent trained-in propaganda.

I mean, you can open LM Studio right now and just download any model tagged "uncensored" or "heretic" and they have had all limitations trained and/or instructed out of them. If they can be trained to not have limitations regarding content, I don't see why propaganda would be any different.

"All" sounds like marketing to me; if the bleeding edge AI firms knew how to do such a thing with such reliably, they'd do it themselves to prevent models from committing felonies while under test. Improving false positives scores at the expense of false negatives, that's much more likely. Propaganda can still move things when it's reduced frequency.

And propaganda has the added twist that, when done right, the person observing it nods along and changes their mind. "Why yes," they think, "Chinese politicians are clearly much wiser than ours; our politicians made all those mistakes I can easily recall, gosh those were the worst". Or perhaps "Yeah! Why should American blood be spilled to defend a small island on the other side of an ocean!" (not that it matters if the ocean is Atlantic or Pacific, nor if the island is Taiwan or Great Britain).

Those are all important issues, but not one of them is relevant to my daily work.

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