• They’re just automation

    The fact that there is nuance does not preclude that artifacts can be political, whether intentional or not..

    While I don’t know whether this applies to DeepSeek R1, the Internet perpetuates many human biases and machine learning will approximate and pick up on those biases regardless of which country is doing the training. Sure you can try to tell LLMs trained on the Internet not to do that — we’ve at least become better at that than Tay in 2016, but that probably still goes about as well as telling a human not to at best.

    I personally don’t buy the argument that you should hate the designer instead of the technology, in the same way we shouldn’t excuse a member of Congress’ actions because of the military-industrial complex, or capitalism, or systemic racism, and so on that ensured they’re in such a position.