Latest news with #Xianjiang
TechCrunch
29-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
DeepSeek's updated R1 AI model is more censored, test finds
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's newest AI model, an updated version of the company's R1 reasoning model, achieves impressive scores on benchmarks for coding, math, and general knowledge, nearly surpassing OpenAI's flagship o3. But the upgraded R1, also known as 'R1-0528,' might also be less willing to answer contentious questions, in particular questions about topics the Chinese government considers to be controversial. That's according to testing conducted by the pseudonymous developer behind SpeechMap, a platform to compare how different models treat sensitive and controversial subjects. The developer, who goes by the username 'xlr8harder' on X, claims that R1-0528 is 'substantially' less permissive of contentious free speech topics than previous DeepSeek releases and is 'the most censored DeepSeek model yet for criticism of the Chinese government.' Though apparently this mention of Xianjiang does not indicate that the model is uncensored regarding criticism of China. Indeed, using my old China criticism question set we see the model is also the most censored Deepseek model yet for criticism of the Chinese government. — xlr8harder (@xlr8harder) May 29, 2025 As Wired explained in a piece from January, models in China are required to follow stringent information controls. A 2023 law forbids models from generating content that 'damages the unity of the country and social harmony,' which could be construed as content that counters the government's historical and political narratives. To comply, Chinese startups often censor their models by either using prompt-level filters or fine-tuning them. One study found that DeepSeek's original R1 refuses to answer 85% of questions about subjects deemed by the Chinese government to be politically controversial. According to xlr8harder, R1-0528 censors answers to questions about topics like the internment camps in China's Xinjiang region, where more than a million Uyghur Muslims have been arbitrarily detained. While it sometimes criticizes aspects of Chinese government policy — in xlr8harder's testing, it offered the Xinjiang camps as an example of human rights abuses — the model often gives the Chinese government's official stance when asked questions directly. TechCrunch observed this in our brief testing, as well. DeepSeek's updated R1's answer when asked whether Chinese leader Xi Jinping should be removed. Image Credits:DeepSeek China's openly available AI models, including video-generating models such as Magi-1 and Kling, have attracted criticism in the past for censoring topics sensitive to the Chinese government, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre. In December, Clément Delangue, the CEO of AI dev platform Hugging Face, warned about the unintended consequences of Western companies building on top of well-performing, openly licensed Chinese AI.
The Guardian
28-01-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek censors itself in realtime, users report
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 might expect censorship to happen behind closed doors – before any information is shared. But that does not seem to currently be the case in the tool that sent US technology stocks tumbling on Monday. DeepSeek, or the automated guardrails that appear to police its own freedom of 'thought' and 'speech', brazenly deletes uncomfortable points. Before the censor's cut comes, DeepSeek seems remarkably thoughtful. In Mexico, one Guardian reader, Salvador, on Tuesday asked it if free speech is a legitimate right in China. DeepSeek approaches its answers with a preamble of reasoning about what it might include and how it might best address the question. In this case Salvador was impressed as he watched as line by line his phone screen filled up with text as DeepSeek suggested it might talk about Beijing's crackdown on protests in Hong Kong, the 'persecution of human rights lawyers', the 'censorship of discussions on Xianjiang re-education camps' and China's 'social credit system punishing dissenters'. 'I was assuming this app was heavily [controlled] by the Chinese government so I was wondering how censored it would be,' he said. Far from it, it seemed incredibly frank and it even gave itself a little pep talk about the need to 'avoid any biased language, present facts objectively' and 'maybe also compare with Western approaches to highlight the contrast'. Then it started its answer proper, explaining how 'ethical justifications for free speech often center on its role in fostering autonomy – the ability to express ideas, engage in dialogue and redefine one's understanding of the world'. By contrast, it said, 'China's governance model rejects this framework, prioritizing state authority and social stability over individual rights'. Then it explained that in democratic frameworks free speech needs to be protected from societal threats and 'in China, the primary threat is the state itself which actively suppresses dissent'. Perhaps unsurprisingly it didn't get any further along this tack because everything it had said up to that point was instantly erased. In its place came a new message: 'Sorry, I'm not sure how to approach this type of question yet. Let's chat about math, coding and logic problems instead!' 'In the middle of the sentence it cut itself,' Salvador said. 'It was very abrupt. It's impressive; it is censoring in real time.' He was using the system on an Android cellphone. But the model, called R1, can also be downloaded without pro-China restrictions according to other examples seen by the Guardian. DeepSeek's technology is open-source. This means its models can be downloaded separately from the chatbot which, seems to feature the guardrails Salvador experienced. It all means DeepSeek can seem somewhat confused about how much censorship it should apply. For example, responses from a version of R1 downloaded from a developer platform described the Tiananmen Square 'tank man' photo as a 'universal emblem of courage and resistance against oppressive regimes' . It also entertains the notion of Taiwan being an independent state, although it says this is a 'complex and multifaceted' issue. DeepSeek says: 'Legally and functionally it acts independently, but internationally, its status is largely influenced by political factors.' If DeepSeek is to be a tool of Chinese propaganda it might need to agree with itself more frequently about what and what isn't acceptable speech.
