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Chinese aI Chatbot DeepSeek Censors itself in Realtime, Users Report

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

Users explore DeepSeek have seen the Chinese AI chatbot reply and then censor itself in genuine time, offering a detaining insight into its control of information and viewpoint.

Users might expect censorship to occur behind closed doors, before any details is shared. But that does not appear to be the case in the tool that sent US innovation stocks toppling on Monday. DeepSeek, or the automated guardrails that appear to police its own flexibility of “thought” and “speech”, brazenly deletes unpleasant points.

Before the censor’s cut comes, DeepSeek seems incredibly thoughtful. In Mexico, Guardian reader Salvador asked it on Tuesday if complimentary speech was a genuine right in China. DeepSeek approaches its answers with a preamble of thinking about what it might include and how it may best attend to the concern. In this case Salvador was impressed as he watched as line by line his phone screen filled up 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 wondering how censored it would be,” he said.

Far from it, it seemed extremely frank and it even offered itself a little pep talk about the requirement to “prevent any prejudiced language, present realities objectively” and “maybe likewise compare with western methods to highlight the contrast”.

Then it started its answer appropriate, describing how “ethical validations for totally free speech often centre on its function in cultivating autonomy – the capability to reveal concepts, engage in discussion and redefine one’s understanding of the world”. By contrast, it stated: “China’s governance model declines this structure, prioritising state authority and social stability over specific rights.”

Then it discussed that in democratic frameworks complimentary speech required to be safeguarded from and “in China, the primary hazard is the state itself which actively suppresses dissent”. Perhaps unsurprisingly it didn’t get any additional along this tack since everything it had stated as much as that point was instantly erased. In its place came a brand-new message: “Sorry, I’m uncertain how to approach this type of question yet. Let’s chat about mathematics, coding and logic issues rather!”

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

He was using the system on an Android phone. But the design, 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 models can be downloaded individually from the chatbot, which seems to include the guardrails Salvador experienced. All of it implies DeepSeek can seem rather baffled about just how much censorship it need to apply.

For instance, responses from a version of R1 downloaded from a designer platform explained the Tiananmen Square “tank guy” image as a “universal emblem of nerve and resistance against overbearing regimes”. It also amuses the concept of Taiwan being an independent state, although it says this is a “complex and multifaceted” issue.