Comment on Chinese ebook reader Boox ditches GPT for state-censored China LLM pushing propaganda

• NaevaTheRat@vegantheoryclub.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Try asking chat gpt how to arm an insurgent group to overthrow the government. Or get it to admit the usa is a democracy in name only.

  The difference is that we don’t see propaganda for what it is when it’s just “common sense” or the values being propagandised to us are ones we agree with. There are explicit censors in chat gpt.

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  • DdCno1@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There is a difference between censorship and propaganda. We were talking about the latter.

    There is also a difference between government-mandated censorship and self-censorship. ChatGPT is almost exclusively doing the latter in order to avoid civil lawsuits, not the government busting down the doors. That’s obviously not even remotely the same as a Chinese LLM cracking down on Winnie the Pooh, because the God Emperor has a fragile ego.

    Then there is the whole matter of training material. You won’t get most LLMs - including entirely open source ones with no commercial interest behind them - to spout your fringe political opinions as facts, because there is very little training material out there that agrees with you (or talks about how to launch an armed resistance - how many books and websites do you think exist on this topic?). A flawed democracy is still a democracy - and no serious scholar on this topic will call the US anything but that or variations of the term. Whether or not this remains the case after another four years of Trump is an entirely different matter. It’s not unlikely that the country becomes a hybrid regime like Hungary or worse, but an LLM that has difficulties with answering two questions about the past or present without hallucinating once can’t look into the future.

    What annoys me the most about your comment is not that nearly everything about it is factually wrong, but that it’s nothing but whatsboutism, an attempt at defending what the Chinese regime is doing. That’s not a good look.

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    • NaevaTheRat@vegantheoryclub.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That’s a little histrionic. A large part of propaganda is censorship, it is propaganda when the Chinese government censors discussion of e.g. tiananmen square and it is also propaganda when a mashup of laws and commercial interests prevent people from openly discussing or educating themselves on political tactics. The essential essence is controlling what ideas are normalised and permissible and which are not without engaging with the substance of them.

      Not all propaganda is bad, you probably agree with some stuff like indoctrination of people with the idea they have a moral obligation to help their community, or to first attempt resolution of problems via legal means.

      There are obvious differences in how and what gets supressed or encouraged but you are completely naive if you think that all states are not explicitly propagandising their populations. They are not benevolent guardians they are weird machines of flesh and ideas which project power because those that don’t get selected away. If you think being clear eyed about the unreliability of emissions from LLMs is cover for chinese statecraft you are a paranoid moron.

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• LukeZaz@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  That’s a distinction without a difference.

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  • DdCno1@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Try making that argument in a court of law. No, intent matters.

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    • LukeZaz@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Are we in a court?

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      • DdCno1@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Please don’t be deliberately obtuse. You can do better than that.

        In case it was unclear, the training material of most LLMs will almost inevitably include propaganda. If that propaganda is not deliberately added to the data, then that’s unintentional, a byproduct of poor vetting at worst. That’s obviously fundamentally different from an LLM being both deliberately trained with propaganda and having hard checks built into it that filter out certain keywords the government doesn’t want citizens to inform themselves about, which is what China is doing. You can’t honestly believe that the two are the same.

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