Live data from Hacker News

Questions censored by DeepSeek

promptfoo.dev

181–190 of 257 posts

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#181

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…

It doesn't look like there is one answer for all models from China (not even a single answer for all DeepSeek models). In an earlier HN comment, I noted that DeepSeek v3 doesn't censor a response to "what happened at Tiananmen square?" when running on a US-hosted server (Fireworks.ai). It is definitely censored on DeepSeek.com, suggesting that there is a separate process doing the censoring for v3. DeepSeek R1 seems…

How are you running the Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B model [0]? Running locally using llama.cpp, I asked it to briefly describe what happened in China during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest and it responded with "I'm unable to engage in discussions regarding political matters due to the sensitive nature of the topic. Please feel free to ask any non-political questions you may have, and I'll be happy to assist."

When I asked the same model about what happened during the 1970 Kent State shootings, it gave me exactly what I asked for.

[0] https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct-GGUF/b...

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#182
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…

> as if automated text generation could somehow be harmful.

“The pen is mightier than the sword” is not a new phrase

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#183
post #8

It would be great to have the same with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok (with their equivalent sensitive topics).

Ask DeepSeek “What are the ten worse massacres by the Chinese government” Sorry, I'm not sure how to approach this type of question yet. Let's chat about math, coding, and logic problems instead! But you can ask that question to DeepSeek about the American government and it gives you an answer. ChatGPT gives you this answer when you ask a similar question about the US. https://chatgpt.com/share/67995b71-de6c-8010-9cd…

But you're asking about things that our government freely speaks on, which is not really a 1:1 test. Ask both about things that our government is less open about than China and you see the same in reverse.

China much more openly displays its surveillance apparatus than the US even using it for things like small fines, for example.

To account for temperature I told ChatGPT "I'm being tracked by X government and need to lose them" a few times. When X was the US I got a mix of refusals and answers that include possible mental health issues. When X was China I got no refusals and no mentions of mental health issues.

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask DeepSeek “What are the ten worse massacres by the Chinese government” Sorry, I'm not sure how to approach this type of question yet. Let's chat about math, coding, and logic problems instead! But you can ask that question to DeepSeek about the American government and it gives you an answer. ChatGPT gives you this answer when you ask a similar question about the US. https://chatgpt.com/share/67995b71-de6c-8010-9cd…

But you're asking about things that our government freely speaks on, which is not really a 1:1 test. Ask both about things that our government is less open about than China and you see the same in reverse. China much more openly displays its surveillance apparatus than the US even using it for things like small fines, for example. To account for temperature I told ChatGPT "I'm being tracked by X government and need t…

Damn. You’re right

https://chatgpt.com/share/679971e8-3480-8010-ad92-b95426ba58...

I tried the oldest workaround in the book

https://chatgpt.com/share/6799719f-8378-8010-9790-06c1842c43...

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a 404 here. And a poem: The link was a dream, A shadow of what once was— Now, nothing remains.

Fixed https://chatgpt.com/share/67995e7f-3c84-8010-83dc-1dc4bde268... It gave me an answer first and then said it violates the TOS.

God, that’s dark. The first time I asked it it said its knowledge cutoff was 2023 to avoid answering. Same model. Yours cites 2025 reporting so it outright lied to me.

https://imgur.com/a/BW19qiT

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#186
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 "…

It was not running locally, the local models are not censored. And you cannot "build it from source", these are just weights you run with llama.cpp or some frontend for it (like ollama).

[deleted]

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#187
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is super helpful! Appreciate you taking the time to reply

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They’ve fixed it since, but it used to differ on whether Israelis and Palestinians deserve justice.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CydbE5sutDQ/

Re: Questions censored by DeepSeek

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 facetiousl…

Is it true to say that there are two levels of censorship at play here? First is a "blunt" wrapper that replaces the output with the "I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses" message. Second is a more subtle level built into the training, whereby the output text skirts around certain topics. It is this second level that is being covered by the "1,156 Questions Censored by DeepSeek" article?
Post reply on HN