It's fascinating the degree of defensiveness that shows up in comments on behalf of censorship, especially if it's Chinese. I think the reality is that these models are always going to be critically evaluated in terms of how they tailor AI to respond to topics they deem sensitive.
Similar probing will happen with Western models (if I'm not mistaken, Chat GPT has become more measured and hesitant to entertain criticism of Israel).
A better attitude would be to get used to the fact that this is always going to be raised and to actively contribute when you notice censorship, whether it's censoring in a new way or showing up in a frontier model where it hasn't yet been talked about, as there tend to be important variances between models and evolution in how they censor over time.
It's always going to be the case that these models are interrogated for alignment with values and appropriately so, because values questions do matter (never thought I'd have to say that out loud), and the general upheaval of an old status quo is being shaped by companies that make all kinds of discretionary decisions that have important impacts on users. Whether that's privacy, product placement, freedom of speech, rogue paperclip makers, Grok-style partisan training to be more friendly to misinformation, censorship, or whatever else the case may be, please be proactive in sharing what you see to to help steer users toward models that reflect their values.
And who knows for how long? My experience with very early iterations of Deepseek had direct answers to questions about Hong Kong, but later applied some kind of updates that stopped engaging with the topic. What was especially fascinating to me was some kind of hasty retrofitted layer of censorship, where Deepseek would actually show you an answer and then right in front of your eyes would replace it with a different answer saying it couldn't address the topic.
