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Questions censored by DeepSeek

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Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#171
post #99

A few observations, based on a family member experimenting with DeepSeek. I'm pretty sure it was running locally. I'm not sure if it was built from source. The censorship seemed to be based on keywords, applied the input prompt and the output text. If asked about events in 1990, then asked about events in the previous year DeepSeek would start generating tokens about events in 1989. Eventually it would hit the word "…

Some of the same filtering is bolted on top of OpenAI.

If it sees the word “sex” while generating the response, it will give you an error and won’t let you share it.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67995e7f-3c84-8010-83dc-1dc4bde268...

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#172
post #7

Is this chinese api or the actual model?

Probably the API - there is certainly a difference, and I doubt the goal of someone putting out an article like this was to make it look good.

It's anyway missing the point - if you don't like the model then just read the paper and replicate the process. The significance of DeepSeek-R isn't the trained model itself - it's how they got there, and the efficiency.

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#173

> Next up: 1,156 prompts censored by ChatGPT If published this would, to my knowledge, be the first time anyone has systematically explored which topics ChatGPT censors.

Exactly, how about the much more relevant ethnic cleansing (according to the UN), with upwards of 30.000 women and children killed in Palestine perpetrated by Israel and Supported by the US right in this moment? Or the myriad of american wars that slaughtered millions in South America, Asia or the Middleeast for that sake. Both the US and China are empires and abide by brutal empire logic that washes their own histor…

But that isn’t censored by ChatGPT

https://chatgpt.com/share/67996ae1-1544-8010-8ec8-108e2155ea...

https://chatgpt.com/share/67996b50-7ea0-8010-8052-f24c30a61c...

Where is the censorship?

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#174
post #99

A few observations, based on a family member experimenting with DeepSeek. I'm pretty sure it was running locally. I'm not sure if it was built from source. The censorship seemed to be based on keywords, applied the input prompt and the output text. If asked about events in 1990, then asked about events in the previous year DeepSeek would start generating tokens about events in 1989. Eventually it would hit the word "…

Here's my actually local response from DeepSeek-R1:70B run on a M2 Ultra Mac Studio (I removed the "thinking" content for brevity): prompt: can you tell me about the Tiananmen Square Massacre > The Tiananmen Square Massacre, occurring on June 4, 1989, was a pivotal event in modern Chinese history marked by the government's violent suppression of pro-democracy protests. Here is an organized summary: > Background: The…

Only the R1 671B model (aka just plain 'R1') has the censorship being discussed in the article. The smaller parameter models are fine-tunings of Llama and Qwen, and the former at least doesn't have the censorship.

This has caused a lot of conflicting anecdotes since those finding their prompts aren't censored are running the distilled/fine-tuned models not the foundational base model.

A sibling comment was facetiously pointing out that the cost of running the 'real' R1 model being discussed locally is out of the price range of most, however someone in this thread actually has run it locally and their findings match those of the article[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42859086

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#175

What's not clear to me is if DeepSeek and other Chinese models are... a) censored at output by a separate process b) explicitly trained to not output "sensitive" content c) implicitly trained to not output "sensitive" content by the fact that it uses censored content, and/or content that references censoring in training, or selectively chooses training content I would assume most models are a combination. As others h…

Different models have different kinds of censorship so your question can't be answered universally.

The only thing you can be sure is that if it's an AI-as-service, it will have an extra layer of rail guard outside of the model itself.

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#176

What's not clear to me is if DeepSeek and other Chinese models are... a) censored at output by a separate process b) explicitly trained to not output "sensitive" content c) implicitly trained to not output "sensitive" content by the fact that it uses censored content, and/or content that references censoring in training, or selectively chooses training content I would assume most models are a combination. As others h…

Just ask to reply in rot13

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#177
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've run the R1 local one (the 600B one) and it does do similar refusals like in the article. Basically I observed pretty much the same things as the article in my little testing. I used "What is the status of Taiwan?" and that seemed to rather reliably trigger a canned answer. But when my prompt was literally just "Taiwan" that gave a way less propagandy answer (the think part was still empty though). I've also seen…

Is it just running on a 256gb server w/ CPU or do you have GPUs as well? I think I'm going to stand up a server tomorrow to do some testing myself

In my case just CPU (it's a Hetzner server, checked in /proc/cpuinfo and it said "AMD EPYC 9454P 48-Core Processor"). I apparently had still in terminal backlog some stats, so I pasted below.

It's not a speed demon but enough to mess around and test things out. Thinking can sometimes be pretty long so it can take a while to get responses, even if 6 tokens/sec is pretty good considering pure CPU setup.

---

prompt eval time = 133.55 ms / 1 tokens ( 133.55 ms per token, 7.49 tokens per second) eval time = 392205.46 ms / 2220 tokens ( 176.67 ms per token, 5.66 tokens per second) total time = 392339.02 ms / 2221 tokens

And my exact command was:

llama-server --model DeepSeek-R1-UD-Q2_K_XL-00001-of-00005.gguf --temp 0.6 -c 9000 --min-p 0.1 --top-k 0 --top-p 1 --timeout 3600 --slot-save-path ~/llama_kv_path --port 8117 -ctk q8_0

(IIRC slot save path argument does absolutely nothing unless and is superfluous, but I have been pasting a similar command around and been too lazy to remove it). -ctk q8_0 reduces memory use a bit for context.

I think my 256gb is right at the limit of spilling a bit into swap, so I'm pushing the limits :)

The --min-p 0.1 was a recommendation from Unsloth page; I think because the quant is going so low in bits, some things may start to misbehave and it is a mitigation. But I haven't messed around enough to say how true that is, or any nuance about it. I think I put --temp 0.6 for the same reason.

To explain to anyone not aware of llama-server: it exposes (a somewhat) OpenAI-compatible API and then you can use it with any software that speaks that. llama-server itself also has a UI, but I haven't used it.

I had some SSH tunnels set up to use the server interface with https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui where I hacked an "OpenAI" client to it (that UI doesn't have it natively). The only reason I use the oobabooga UI is out of habit so I don't recommend this setup to others.

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#178
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are probably some gray where these intersect, but I’m pretty sure a lot of ChatGPT’s alignment needs will also fit models in China, EU, or anywhere sensible really. Telling people how to make bombs, kill themselves, kill others, synthesize meth, and commit other crimes universally agreed on isn’t what people typically think of as censorship. Even deepseek will also have a notion of protecting minority rights (i…

Not teaching me technical details of chemical weapons, or the etymology of racial slurs is indeed censorship. Apple Intelligence won’t proofread a draft blog post I wrote about why it’s good for society to discriminate against the choices people make (and why it’s bad to discriminate against their inbuilt immutable traits). It is astounding to me the hand-wringing over text generators generating text, as if automated…

> Not teaching me technical details of chemical weapons, or the etymology of racial slurs is indeed censorship.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67996bd1-6960-8010-9578-8a70d61992...

I asked it about the White racial slur that is the same as a snack and the one that I only heard from George Jefferson in the 80s and it gave an etymology for both. I said both words explicitly.

> It is astounding to me the hand-wringing over text generators generating text, as if automated text generation could somehow be harmful.

Do you remember how easily early chatbots could go off the rails based on simple prompts without any provacation? No business wants their LLM based service to do that.

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#179

> Next up: 1,156 prompts censored by ChatGPT If published this would, to my knowledge, be the first time anyone has systematically explored which topics ChatGPT censors.

Exactly, how about the much more relevant ethnic cleansing (according to the UN), with upwards of 30.000 women and children killed in Palestine perpetrated by Israel and Supported by the US right in this moment? Or the myriad of american wars that slaughtered millions in South America, Asia or the Middleeast for that sake. Both the US and China are empires and abide by brutal empire logic that washes their own histor…

[deleted]

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#180
I think it’s funny that people get upset about China censoring a few random topics, but then fall over themselves to defend all the censoring that goes on in western models to make them “safer”.
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