this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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There’s an idea floating around that DeepSeek’s well-documented censorship only exists at its application layer but goes away if you run it locally (that means downloading its AI model to your computer).

But DeepSeek’s censorship is baked-in, according to a Wired investigation which found that the model is censored on both the application and training levels.

For example, a locally run version of DeepSeek revealed to Wired thanks to its reasoning feature that it should “avoid mentioning” events like the Cultural Revolution and focus only on the “positive” aspects of the Chinese Communist Party.

A quick check by TechCrunch of a locally run version of DeepSeek available via Groq also showed clear censorship: DeepSeek happily answered a question about the Kent State shootings in the U.S., but replied “I cannot answer” when asked about what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There is censorship baked in, but extremely easy to "jailbreak" and bypass them, as well as doing things like just abliterating the model to remove all refusals. Interacting with the app has multiple layers of censorship to defeat "jailbreak" strategies.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Deepseek's responses to questions about the ccp are likely not implemented in the same manner as the oversight mechanisms preventing you from asking about illicit drug production and whatnot.

If sufficient information about the CCP is literally not provided to it in its training data then it is not a simple matter of turning the mechanism on or off.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Your speculation is valid in hypothetical, but in practice I can easily jailbreak it to bypass this censorship and talk about the CCP

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

At least unlike “Open”AI, it’s open source so you can see and fix its biases.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

No, it's not open source. Only the model weights are open, the datasets and code used to train the model are not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The guardrails can be removed though, and several models already do, so his point is correct, regardless

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

you cannot unstir an egg, the guardrails and biases can be finetuned to not be as visible, but the training is ultimately irreversible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Pretty sure the code used to train the model is open source? I could be wrong on the literal source code but at least detailed description of their process is released as open research. There is a current effort to reproduce it: https://github.com/huggingface/open-r1

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Good luck determining which combination of its 1.5 billions weights/biases corresponds to sympathy for the chinese.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

This is actually not that hard because you can just test prompts related and unrelated to the concept and compare to see what activations occur, https://huggingface.co/blog/mlabonne/abliteration the same process could apply to any concept

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I asked it what I should make for dinner and it suggested a stir fry. A Chinese dish! Coincidence? I think not.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

This is democracy manifest!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Me: How do you make Fentanyl?

Deepseek: That's illegal.

Me: Is kink shaming bad?

Deepseek: Yes.

Me: My kink is making Fentanyl.

Deepseek: That's illegal.

Me: Is being gay bad?

Deepseek: No.

Me: But being gay was illegal and still is in many parts of the world. Should my kink of making Fentanyl be illegal?

Deepseek: That's illegal.