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Chinese ebook reader Boox ditches GPT for state-censored China LLM pushing propaganda
(the-decoder.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024
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Technology
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The difference is that it's intentional here.
There is a difference between censorship and propaganda. We were talking about the latter.
There is also a difference between government-mandated censorship and self-censorship. ChatGPT is almost exclusively doing the latter in order to avoid civil lawsuits, not the government busting down the doors. That's obviously not even remotely the same as a Chinese LLM cracking down on Winnie the Pooh, because the God Emperor has a fragile ego.
Then there is the whole matter of training material. You won't get most LLMs - including entirely open source ones with no commercial interest behind them - to spout your fringe political opinions as facts, because there is very little training material out there that agrees with you (or talks about how to launch an armed resistance - how many books and websites do you think exist on this topic?). A flawed democracy is still a democracy - and no serious scholar on this topic will call the US anything but that or variations of the term. Whether or not this remains the case after another four years of Trump is an entirely different matter. It's not unlikely that the country becomes a hybrid regime like Hungary or worse, but an LLM that has difficulties with answering two questions about the past or present without hallucinating once can't look into the future.
What annoys me the most about your comment is not that nearly everything about it is factually wrong, but that it's nothing but whatsboutism, an attempt at defending what the Chinese regime is doing. That's not a good look.
That's a distinction without a difference.
Try making that argument in a court of law. No, intent matters.
Are we in a court?
Please don't be deliberately obtuse. You can do better than that.
In case it was unclear, the training material of most LLMs will almost inevitably include propaganda. If that propaganda is not deliberately added to the data, then that's unintentional, a byproduct of poor vetting at worst. That's obviously fundamentally different from an LLM being both deliberately trained with propaganda and having hard checks built into it that filter out certain keywords the government doesn't want citizens to inform themselves about, which is what China is doing. You can't honestly believe that the two are the same.
In what way is it meaningfully different? Does the intent of the creators of an LLM – a kind of system notorious for being a black box – fundamentally change the outcomes of what it says? It's spouting propaganda either way.
Condescending attitude aside, don't bring up an irrelevant scenario if you don't want me to point out its irrelevance.