upvote
Does all this insane behavior from the US justify the Chinese censorship?
reply
Of course not. But its disengenuous to only mention one like the US is clearly th lesser of 2 evils
reply
Are you implying that western models were manipulated to hide and distort those events, like they do with the Tiananmen Square event, and Taiwan?
reply
Let's say I'm more outraged by the actual events.
reply
Imagine eastern models were only trained on chinese official news. Would you call that an unbiased, uncensored LLM? Would it be practically different from just directly censoring the LLM?

In the west, especially in the USA, rich capitalists and warmongers control the narrative put forth in the news, which gets fed to the LLMs, which results in what you could call auto-censorship.

They manipulate the training data instead of censoring the model, but the result is the same.

reply
As far as I'm aware there's no media government control in democratic western countries (yet).

The LLMs aren't trained on "official news", if there's such a thing in Western countries - at best government press releases, is that what you mean by "official news"?

So I don't see how that's censoring/manipulation of an LLM.

Like for example, Wikipedia is a Western construction and would never exist in China, or Russia, without government supervision (rendering it useless).

When you say "rich capitalists and warmongers control the narrative", where does that happen? I mean practically.

It's like your conception of western media is similar to China and Russia, where censorship, control and filters are applied.

> They manipulate the training data instead of censoring the model, but the result is the same.

Do you have any proof of this?

reply
> When you say "rich capitalists and warmongers control the narrative", where does that happen? I mean practically.

i don't agree with the hyperbolic nature of the op here but if you're sincerely interested in the question this is what chomsky and herman (imo quite persuasively) argue in Manufacturing Consent. attaching a profit motive to the distribution of new information, particularly in an economy that tends towards centralization of, necessarily biases what news is printed.

it's certainly not as visually dramatic or directly controlled an effect as the prc's top-down model, but markets are effective.

reply
Ask Gemini today if the United States is trying to destroy the nation of Iran, and it will feed you the (white-washed) party line, straight from the White House, with a bit of 'some people disagree' thrown in. No mention of America's threats of "Complete annihilation", "Killing a civlization", and all the rest.

> Summary: The U.S. is currently engaged in an active war aimed at dismantling the Iranian government and its military capabilities, but it distinguishes this from destroying the country or its people. However, the humanitarian impact—including civilian casualties from airstrikes and the domestic crackdown by Iranian security forces—has led many international observers to warn that the campaign risks long-term instability and "state collapse" rather than a simple transition of power.

It does do quite a bit better if you ask it about the genocide in Gaza, summarizing the case for it, and citing only token justifications from the guilty party.

As of April 2026, Gemini is... For very obvious reasons, highly biased towards cultural consensus. If your cultural consensus is strong on some really messed up things, that's the outcome that it's going to give you.

reply
Isn't there a difference between the models output reflecting the mean of public discourse and the active adjustment of information by the government?

Irrespective of how close the outcomes are to the actual facts, those two things have a different quality, don't they?

reply
> Isn't there a difference between the models output reflecting the mean of public discourse and the active adjustment of information by the government?

Not as much a difference as you would wish, as mean of public discourse is very actively managed, to our collective detriment, by a very small group of powerful people, which often includes the government. It's the nature of mass media, and the incestuous relationship between power and reach.

They Thought They Were Free, and all that. By the time the 'mean of public discourse' centers on something incredibly stupid or awful, nobody can be arsed to figure out who planted that idea in our heads.

reply
I don't think so, from my peer group I don't see this bias. It really is a difference of opinion. Now you can say half the country is brain washed by propaganda, but those people would say the same of you.

In reality it's only the terminally online that seem to create these narratives.

My point isn't to pick one side or the other, but agreeing with the other poster that the LLMs are not trained specifically to parrot administration propaganda.

reply
History is by definition his story.
reply
It's not. It's an English pun on a Greek word, which roughly means "investigation".
reply