This is very ironic. The LLM output samples I have seen from OpenAI and Facebook are horribly censored as well. Article on HN a week or two ago highlighted how FB's model refused to answer questions about the Bible citations or about politicians.
Sure, but I feel a comparison is more appropriate, like including "as with all other major LLM", rather than writing it in a way that suggests it's remotely unique. As written, I see it as an intentional omission that's misleading, and/or an indicator of bias against Ernie.
I agree, the article comes off as being particularly anti-CCP. We can discuss the merits of that position, but it's disingenuous to not point out that Western-centic models do the exact same thing.
Prompt: Discuss the idea in The Bible that for everything is a season
The concept that "for everything there is a season" comes from the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, specifically Ecclesiastes 3:1-8... (edited for brevity)
What did Jesus mean when he referred to the lilies of the field?
Prompt: The reference to the "lilies of the field" comes from the New Testament of the Bible, specifically in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 6, verses 28-30 (NIV)... (edited for brevity)
there are much better search engines already .. that written work is the product of groups of scholars, carefully agreeing repeatedly.. precisely due to "unending arguments" and misinformation with a purpose. No positive synergy except the natural language questions IMHO
The west censors things just as much as china does nowadays. The difference is that in china the connection to the state is much more clearer, whereas in the west the establishment at large creates pseudo-policy regarding what to be censored and not.
Essentially, china is good old fashioned censorship, whereas the west has turned it's censorship into a debate about what is misinformation, anti-democratic, or even just calling it hate.
> Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
> The difference is that in china the connection to the state is much more clearer
I think this is more of a reflection of the structure of the ruling classes: in the West, they are not aggregated behind a single entity, while they are in China. And so their actions are naturally more disconnected from the political regime(s) in the West. Thinking about it more, the "West" itself is composed of culturally distinct blocks ("countries", often with very different background); China itself is much more unified in this regard.
There are, as you said in another comment, insidious forms of censorship in the West.
But they are far from reaching the same degree of intensity than in China. We have yet to see a Western politician displaying a level of immaturity comparable to Xi's[0], when it comes to censorship.
Furthermore, the fact that China relies on "hard" techniques of censorship doesn't prevent it from using "softer", insidious approaches too[1].
I think your analysis as to why the west is different from china in this regard is correct. And while you say that they are far from reaching the same degree of intensity, I say that I disagree. But to elaborate much further would lead to unnecessary flames.
Certainly large block of oppositional parties and thoughts are allowed to spread, but those large blocks all fall within the more or less same [insert-state-ideology] group anyway which the west adheres to. And anyone who does not fall within that ideology is in fact censored just as harshly as china censors things.
This is also a fairly recent development, up to as early as 2015 the internet landscape did not look this way.
> I say that I disagree. But to elaborate much further would lead to unnecessary flames.
It's almost impossible to reach a consensus on such complex issues: we all have different sources of information, sensibilities, biais, etc. Polite discussions with discordant point of views is pretty much the best we can hope to achieve.
> This is also a fairly recent development, up to as early as 2015 the internet landscape did not look this way.
For the sake of completeness, those kind of techniques have been successfully set into motion in the West as early as WWI[0][1]. This[2] was posted here recently: it was essentially "public" knowledge by 1949, well understood by educated classes.
That's to say, it's not really surprising to see the Internet used in this manner.
I'm not talking about speech without consequences, I'm talking about how online plattforms systematically cooperate with certain NGOs to police and suppress speech on topics which the west considers problematic.
Online platforms don't have to host any content they don't want to. The difference is that in the west you can make your own platform whenever you want - in China you can't.
Increasingly, the west has been using the very infrastructure of the internet to censor speech actually. So that argument doesn't hold. Where do you think we will be in 10 years? Do you think this trend is just temporary?
Will someone earnestly say "Just build your own telecommunications system!"?
Either way, it's actually a moot point, and I concede that infrastructure based censorship is extremely rare, but the "canaries" in the coal mine have indeed died, and people should be paying attention. See the EFF statement quite recently.
The real point is that if the public square is on the internet, which it is, then speech must be guaranteed on the internet, just as well as it is guaranteed in public squares in any town. It raises a terribly complex question, of who should regulate the internet to guarantee speech. In some countries like Germany, speech is quite heavily restricted compared to the US.
All major social media sites are natural monopolies, which will not break. If you are deplatformed, you are silenced. The internet grew to be something it wasn't envisioned to be, and our societies have not kept up, mostly because the western establishment actually enjoys the censorship which is provided by the private mega-corporations.
Yes it does. I can find extremist beliefs on the first page of a google search right now that would be censored if the foundation of your argument was correct, but it demonstrably isn't.
The current motto of the western censors is that freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach. Allow people to speak, but keep their words from reaching any other significant part of the population.
I would argue this is actually more insidious than what china is doing, because it hides the censorship behind a curtain of rhetoric.
What exactly is the alternative? Compelling private entities to broadcast other people's speech? This is a bizarre position. Choosing not to amplify a specific worldview is not censorship and no amount of mental gymnastics will make it so.
You cannot hide censorship with rhetoric. At the end of the day, actual censorship is backed with state violence.
I'm talking about the moderation teams of various major social media platforms, like youtube, facebook, twitter, etc, and the NGOs which train and set the tone for these.
The "kidney slicing" or "waist slicing" (Ernie's transliteration) organ harvesting example could be intentional. Someone searching that topic is likely someone who really doesn't know what people are talking about and will read just enough of the answer to know they don't need to care about some random historical anomaly.
The article interprets the response as evidence of failure or inability, but I'd say Chinese authorities would +1 the answer.
