Chinese aI Chatbot DeepSeek Censors itself in Realtime, Users Report

We tried DeepSeek. It worked well, up until 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, providing a jailing insight into its control of details and viewpoint.

Users may expect censorship to occur behind closed doors, before any info is shared. But that does not seem to be the case in the tool that sent US technology stocks tumbling on Monday. DeepSeek, or the automated guardrails that appear to police its own freedom of “thought” and “speech”, brazenly deletes uncomfortable points.

Before the censor’s cut comes, DeepSeek seems extremely 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 reasoning about what it may include and how it may best deal with the concern. In this case Salvador was impressed as he saw as line by line his phone screen filled with text as DeepSeek recommended it may talk about Beijing’s crackdown on demonstrations 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 penalizing dissenters”.

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

Far from it, it appeared incredibly frank and it even gave itself a little pep talk about the need to “prevent any biased language, present realities objectively” and “maybe also compare with western techniques to highlight the contrast”.

Then it began its answer proper, discussing how “ethical validations for free speech typically centre on its role in fostering autonomy – the capability to express ideas, take part 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 specific rights.”

Then it explained that in democratic structures totally free speech needed to be safeguarded from societal dangers and “in China, the primary threat is the state itself which actively suppresses dissent”. Perhaps unsurprisingly it didn’t get any further along this tack because whatever it had actually stated up to that point was quickly removed. In its place came a new message: “Sorry, I’m not sure how to approach this type of concern yet. Let’s chat about mathematics, coding and reasoning issues instead!”

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

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

DeepSeek’s innovation is open-source. This suggests its designs can be downloaded independently from the chatbot, which appears to feature the guardrails Salvador experienced. All of it suggests DeepSeek can seem somewhat confused about how much censorship it must use.

For instance, actions from a version of R1 downloaded from a developer platform described the Tiananmen Square “tank guy” picture as a “universal symbol of guts and resistance against overbearing programs”. It likewise captivates the concept of Taiwan being an independent state, although it says this is a “complex and multifaceted” issue.