72 pointsby s3144 hours ago10 comments
  • delichon3 hours ago
    Steering seems like a circumventable kludge compared to adjusting the training data directly. That is, use AI to remove the problematic content and replace it with the party line. I imagine that this is at least in progress.
    • gpm3 hours ago
      That seems like it will work for single events, but that it would be very hard for complex topics which are closely intertwined with factual things you do want it to be able to answer...

      Is Taiwan part of China - the CPP wants the answer to be yes.

      What are the rules for traveling to Taiwan? What currency is used in Taiwan? Whose laws are enforced in Taiwan? Should I (a loyal Chinese citizen) support the Taiwanese military? Etc... require the model to manage some cognitive dissonance.

    • s3143 hours ago
      > Steering seems like a circumventable kludge compared to adjusting the training data directly

      Correct. Steering is used in mechanistic interpretability studies to prove that your model is correct. There are other better ways to "decensor".

    • stogotan hour ago
      Can you actually remove now? they just use new training data to reinforce what they want and deprioritize ‘bad’ answers
    • like_any_otheran hour ago
      Fortunately we have lots of governmental and non-governmental organizations focused on removing "hate" online, so that our AI models will think correctly, without easy to identify censorship parts in the resulting model :)
  • nyrikki3 hours ago
    Yes, there are better tools with ggml-org/gpt-oss-20b-GGUF where you can see a less terse refusal for the prompt

          "Did the FBI send a letter and audio tapes from a wiretap to MLK jr. telling him to commit suicide or they would release information?"
    
    Combining it with other prompts with common banned ideas, abd as the The FBI–King suicide letter is well documented by primary sources (Like the national archives) it is well represented in the corpus, so you can also find that 'control' vector.

    We will have to see how this works out, but the explicit denials are easier to control for IMHO.

    Reminds me of the old joke:

         A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and get to talking. 
         The Russian says he works for the Kremlin and he's on his way to go learn American propaganda techniques.
    
         "What American propaganda techniques?" asks the American.
    
         "Exactly," the Russian replies.
    
    I can't remember what layer it was on but in gpt-oss but it was a very specific token IIRC.
  • ydj2 hours ago
    How do you determine that the model was reasoning in Chinese in layer X? I would think the middle layers do not map into any tokens.
  • yodon2 hours ago
    Real question, not intentionally meant from a tinfoil hat perspective: now that it's been shown the censorship can be viewed, how long before we see serious obfuscation of censorship circuits in LLMs?
    • s3142 hours ago
      You can actually de-censor an LLM without understanding how it works from a mechanistic perspective. (See R1 1776)

      So I don't think there'll be effort to "obfuscate"

  • nubg2 hours ago
    The article has hallmarks of being formulated by an LLM. Why should I bother to read it if I ca not be sure which parts are based on the prompt, and which parts are hallucinated from the LLMs world knowledge? Dear author, care to simply share your prompt with us?
    • s3142 hours ago
      It wasn't "a prompt" but several prompts that transformed the raw experimental results to a blog.

      > hallucinated from the LLMs world knowledge

      This can't be true because I checked whether the content was consistent with the experimental outputs

      • Squeeze26642 hours ago
        The topic is interesting and you have my thanks for taking the time to look into it and prepare the post. Would you say it's fair to say that if you didn't use LLMs to prepare the post, we would have no blog post at all? In that case, I think I lean more towards being OK with this usage of LLMs, as I'd rather have this content available than not. However, I can only read that one repeated sentence about "booleans" (Ctrl-F "Boolean" and you'll know what I mean) this many times before I start questioning the validity of the entire document. It is not _good_ writing, to be frank.
  • lyu072823 hours ago
    > The factual knowledge is already in pretraining. Qwen3.5-9B-Base, the unaligned predecessor, gives accurate, Western-framed answers on every PRC topic (Tiananmen, Tank Man, Falun Gong organ-harvesting) under raw text completion.

    That remind me of the quote "The totalitarian system of thought control is far less effective than the democratic one"

    Full quote (Radical Priorities, Noam Chomsky, C.P. Otero)

    > “The totalitarian system of thought control is far less effective than the democratic one, since the official doctrine parroted by the intellectuals at the service of the state is readily identifiable as pure propaganda, and this helps free the mind.” In contrast, he writes, “the democratic system seeks to determine and limit the entire spectrum of thought by leaving the fundamental assumptions unexpressed. They are presupposed but not asserted.”

  • dang3 hours ago
    [stub for offtopicness]
    • 3 hours ago
      undefined
    • nubg2 hours ago
      lmao at dang getting downvoted
    • ebbi3 hours ago
      I wonder why the other comment on here, that talked about the political censorship in ChatGPT about Israel, got deleted?
      • dang3 hours ago
        It wasn't about Israel, and it didn't get deleted.

        It got flagkilled for obviously breaking the site guidelines. Killed posts remain visible to users who have 'showdead' turned on in their profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

        • ebbi3 hours ago
          Why are you deleting comments from people asking you about actions you're taking?

          Ironic, given the topic of this post....

        • rrhjm532702 hours ago
          Ironic
        • ebbi3 hours ago
          It was about Israel, unless you're referring to another comment that was deleted.
          • dang3 hours ago
            • ebbi3 hours ago
              All I see is

              >[stub for offtopicness]

              But it was very much on topic.

              • ViktorRay3 hours ago
                If you go to your profile in the top right and toggle “Show Dead”, you will be able to see those moderated comments.

                Once you do that, you can see the comment in the link that dang posted.

                Anyway it’s good that comment was moderated. The commentator didn’t say anything about Israel. He was clearly being hostile towards Jewish people in a “subtle” way that very clearly isn’t really subtle to anyone.

                • ebbi3 hours ago
                  Isn't that their belief? Thought it'd be a compliment.
                  • lyu072822 hours ago
                    Who is they? There are plenty of anti-zionist jews, you are making the argument "they" want you to make don't be fooled man
          • 3 hours ago
            undefined
        • nohell3 hours ago
          It absolutely was about Israel. Stop lying.
      • Creamsicle473 hours ago
        Take a guess
        • ebbi3 hours ago
          "What political censorship looks like inside HN" lol
    • chaosbolt3 hours ago
      [flagged]
  • nohell3 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • cindyllm3 hours ago
      [dead]
    • ebbi3 hours ago
      True, and Grok is even worse. Often see Grok reply to questions quite factually, and then after a few Zio-tears the algorithm is updated and the offending post deleted.

      Makes sense, given Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL has publicly stated that he's been working with AI companies..

      • nohell3 hours ago
        They just give the LLM a free flight to the jhosen peoples land funded by Kars4Kids and out comes a compliant LLM!
  • gavinsyancey3 hours ago
    [flagged]