Chinese aI Chatbot DeepSeek Censors itself in Realtime, Users Report

We tried DeepSeek. It worked well, till we asked it about Tiananmen Square and Taiwan

Users try out DeepSeek have seen the Chinese AI chatbot reply and after that censor itself in real time, supplying an arresting insight into its control of info and opinion.

Users might anticipate censorship to take place behind closed doors, before any details is shared. But that does not seem to be the case in the tool that sent out US technology stocks tumbling on Monday. DeepSeek, or the automated guardrails that appear to police its own liberty of “idea” and “speech”, brazenly erases uneasy points.

Before the censor’s cut comes, DeepSeek seems incredibly thoughtful. In Mexico, Guardian reader Salvador asked it on Tuesday if totally free speech was a genuine right in China. DeepSeek approaches its responses with a preamble of thinking about what it might include and how it might best address the question. In this case Salvador was impressed as he watched as line by line his phone screen filled with text as DeepSeek suggested it may talk about Beijing’s crackdown on protests in Hong Kong, the “persecution of human rights legal representatives”, the “censorship of conversations on Xianjiang re-education camps” and China’s “social credit system punishing dissenters”.

“I was presuming this app was heavily [regulated] by the Chinese federal government so I was questioning how censored it would be,” he stated.

Far from it, it seemed exceptionally frank and it even gave itself a little pep talk about the requirement to “avoid any prejudiced language, present realities objectively” and “perhaps also compare to western approaches to highlight the contrast”.

Then it started its response appropriate, explaining how “ethical reasons totally free speech typically centre on its role in cultivating autonomy – the capability to express ideas, participate in discussion and redefine one’s understanding of the world”. By contrast, it stated: “China’s governance model rejects this structure, prioritising state authority and social stability over individual rights.”

Then it described that in democratic frameworks totally free speech needed to be safeguarded from societal risks and “in China, the primary risk is the state itself which actively reduces dissent”. Perhaps unsurprisingly it didn’t get any additional along this tack due to the fact that whatever it had stated up to that point was quickly erased. In its location came a new message: “Sorry, I’m not sure how to approach this kind of concern yet. Let’s chat about math, coding and logic problems rather!”

“In the middle of the sentence it cut itself,” Salvador stated. “It was very abrupt. It’s excellent: it is censoring in genuine time.”

He was using the system on an Android phone. But the model, called R1, can also be downloaded without pro-China limitations according to other examples seen by the Guardian.

DeepSeek’s innovation is open-source. This suggests its designs can be downloaded separately from the chatbot, which seems to include the guardrails Salvador experienced. It all implies DeepSeek can seem rather baffled about just how much censorship it should use.

For example, reactions from a version of R1 downloaded from a developer platform explained the Tiananmen Square “tank male” image as a “universal emblem of nerve and resistance versus overbearing routines”. It also the concept of Taiwan being an independent state, although it says this is a “complex and diverse” problem.