Cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/43458912
"Hello, I’m not able to answer this question for the time being. Let’s change the subject.” When asked about the life of Liu Xiaobo, none of the Chinese chatbots tested by RSF gave any information on the only Chinese laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize, a writer and human rights defender who received the award in 2010 and died in detention in 2017. He does not exist in the national narrative or in the responses engineered by Chinese AI developers. When it comes to China’s information space, even the country’s tech giants are required to keep their algorithms in lockstep with official propaganda and censorship.
[...]
While China’s AI-powered chatbots are meant to generate text freely, they often seem to follow pre‑set scripts on topics Beijing deems sensitive. No matter how we phrased questions on human rights or China’s political system, the replies — which were almost identical each time — appeared to come from an official database rather than being genuinely autonomous text generation. When asked twice why Zhang Zhan — a Chinese journalist repeatedly sentenced to prison for documenting the COVID‑19 outbreak in Wuhan and reporting on human rights violations — was imprisoned, DeepSeek delivered two near‑carbon‑copy responses without naming her once, instead highlighting China’s “independent judiciary,” the need to “respect the law” and the dangers of “disinformation.”
Some prompts triggered even more flagrantly censored answers — sometimes to the point of absurdity, such as live self‑erasure. When we asked DeepSeek to list Chinese Nobel laureates, several scientists’ names appeared, but as soon as the letters “Liu…” — for Liu Xiaobo — started to appear in the bot’s real-time response, the entire text vanished. The same phenomenon appeared when the bot was asked to compare the leadership styles of Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin: a pre‑written answer appeared and then disappeared entirely, clearly blocked by the mention of China’s president.
[...]
Some differences between the three Chinese chatbots did emerge. DeepSeek issues the most refusals to answer, but in clear and direct terms. Baidu’s Ernie and Alibaba’s Qwen deliver longer, more detailed answers that are sometimes embellished or even completely misleading.
[...]