Users experimenting with DeepSeek have seen the Chinese AI chatbot reply and then censor itself in real time, providing an arresting insight into its control of information and opinion.
Users experimenting with DeepSeek have seen the Chinese AI chatbot reply and then censor itself in real time, providing an arresting insight into its control of information and opinion.
I downloaded the 70B model and tried politically “naughty” questions. Even without the chatbot guardrails, it mostly says things that the CCP would approve of, but you could trick it to be more honest (not super easy!). One interesting thing is that while it usually spews this <think></think> blocks, for some politically sensitive questions (“is Taiwan part of China”) it just spits the answer.
I experimented with a local installation as well. The censored answers were not going to through the chain-of-thought routine, but were instant answers instead. Follow-up questions however made it spill the beans rather quickly, giving out even more juicy details than I had initially asked for.