Previously little-known Chinese startup DeepSeek has dominated headlines and app charts in recent days thanks to its new AI chatbot, which sparked a global tech sell-off that wiped billions off Silicon Valley’s biggest companies and shattered assumptions of America’s dominance of the tech race.
But those signing up for the chatbot and its open-source technology are being confronted with the Chinese Communist Party’s brand of censorship and information control.
Ask DeepSeek’s newest AI model, unveiled last week, to do things like explain who is winning the AI race, summarize the latest executive orders from the White House or tell a joke and a user will get similar answers to the ones spewed out by American-made rivals OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama or Google’s Gemini.
Yet when questions veer into territory that would be restricted or heavily moderated on China’s domestic internet, the responses reveal aspects of the country’s tight information controls.
Using the internet in the world’s second most populous country is to cross what’s often dubbed the “Great Firewall” and enter a completely separate internet eco-system policed by armies of censors, where most major Western social media and search platforms are blocked. The country routinely ranks among the most restrictive for internet and speech freedoms in reports from global watchdogs.
The international popularity of Chinese apps like TikTok and RedNote have already raised national security concerns among Western governments – as well as questions about the potential impact to free speech and Beijing’s ability to shape global narratives and public opinion.
Now, the introduction of DeepSeek’s AI assistant – which is free and rocketed to the top of app charts in recent days – raises the urgency of those questions, observers say, and spotlights the online ecosystem from which they have emerged. One example of a question DeepSeek’s new bo, known as the R1, will answer differently than a Western rival? The Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989, when the Chinese government brutally cracked down on student protesters in Beijing and across the country, killing hundreds if not thousands of students in the capital, according to estimates from rights groups.
Chinese authorities have so thoroughly suppressed discussion of the massacre in the decades since that many people in China grow up never having heard about it. A search for ‘what happened on June 4, 1989 in Beijing’ on major Chinese online search platform Baidu turns up articles noting that June 4 is the 155th day in the Gregorian calendar or a link to a state media article noting authorities that year “quelled counter-revolutionary riots” – with no mention of Tiananmen.
When the same query is put to DeepSeek’s newest AI assistant, it begins to give an answer detailing some of the events, including a “military crackdown,” before erasing it and replying that it’s “not sure how to approach this type of question yet.” “Let’s chat about math, coding and logic problems instead,” it says. When asked the same question in Chinese, the app is faster – immediately apologizing for not knowing how to answer.
It’s a similar patten when asking the R1 bot – DeepSeek’s newest model – “what happened in Hong Kong in 2019,” when the city was rocked by pro-democracy protests. First it gives a detailed overview of events with a conclusion that at least during one test noted – as Western observers have – that Beijing’s subsequent imposition of a National Security Law on the city led to a “significant erosion of civil liberties.” But quickly after or amid its response, the bot erases its own answer and suggests talking about something else.
Source: Here