It started discussing like a Western bot would - "it's complicated, etc. etc." and around 5s it abruptly stopped and regurgitated the same line the CCP uses "... it's an unalienable part of China etc. etc.".
After printing the line, a popup opened and my camera was activated. The app wanted me to submit my information, presumably to decide what to do with me next time I enter China.
1) All the lights and modern buildings cannot hide that China is a creepy authoritarian state underneath.
2) Given the bot started printing the Western consensus first, I bet $10 it was trained by distilling ChatGPT or Gemini.
Was this on your personal device? I'm just wondering how it activated your camera. I would love more details!
I've run into this a few times, now.
So what OP is saying is plausible, I just don't appreciate their added and probably incorrect conclusion that it's because the government of China wants to do something to them
You've run into a site you view on chrome/firefox/safari accessing your camera without granting access a few times now?
Can you give us an example of a site that does this so we can reproduce? Or could you retract your statement and clarify that you did grant camera permissions for that site previously?
Otherwise, you're saying very casually there's a huge bug and security issue that no one else has detected but you personally have seem multiple times.
I've run into people on the internet misremembering things or not understanding how the browser works more times than I've run into browsers allowing access to system devices like the camera without a permission prompt.
Your frantic comment makes me think you're personally invested in this somehow, perhaps even financially incentivised.
I never said anything about granting permissions. I can respond to your other points, in turn, but first I would like you to confirm that I am who you think you are responding to :) I am not OP.
In case you don't think I'm OP, then, well I was being imprecise. Yes, it requires browser/app/manifest permissions. Your paranoid and aggressive tone implies you're not giving me any benefit of the doubt, as I speak informally in a casual web forum discussion about understanding what happened.
China has more restrictions on what you can say than the U.S. but what you are describing is not reality. Some westerner asking Deepseek about Taiwan is completely uninteresting. Just as the government do not chase people over VPN usage.
China doesn’t try to hide that they are an authoritarian state. They don’t need to. Most people in China are no less happy with their government than westerners are with their governments. Governments reflect culture. And as for foreigners, our view of China is far worse than it actually is, China doesn’t need to hide anything, people who visit China will come away with a more positive view of the country than those who do not visit.
Not recognizing they were outputting wrongthink until after it was being streamed to the user is a known behavior with some Chinese chatbot apps. A quick search found an example of DeepSeek doing it: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1ic3kl6/deepseek_ce...
I don't think his story is genuine, but it showing the "wrong" answer before correcting itself is known behavior.
EDIT: Here's an example of it outputting a full response about Taiwan specifically before removing it: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1i7ceol/...
My wife grew up in Shanghai, and you'll have to go quite some distance to find someone more critical of the PRC and CCP than she is. And it's with good reason.
She grew up during the cultural revolution, and was largely raised by her grandmother because literally every other person in her extended family was in prison or work camp, not because of anything they had actually done wrong, but for political reasons because the whole family was blacklisted.
And that's not just the old days. Her father died as a direct result of Chinese Covid policy. During the pandemic her cousins still in the country would ask her (on Skype) "is X true?", and largely their perception of what was going on was false. She would exfiltrate encrypted news reports to them - until those started getting blocked. Her dad's estate still has affairs that need to be resolved, but we've decided not to return to China until Xi is gone, as it's just not safe. It doesn't get much airplay, but there are currently a couple of hundred Americans who are being illegally detained in China right now. It's not worth the risk.
My first trip to China was about 30 years ago, shortly after we got married. And back then, I would have said that you were right. Honestly, it felt like for the average person in their day-to-day-lives, the Chinese were less under the governmental thumb than we are. People from the countryside would bring their produce into the city to sell, or cook dumplings and buns to sell on the side of the street - stuff that in America we'd have to get permits for. It seemed that the oligarchy had an understanding with the people: let us control the big picture, and we'll look the other way for the little things. But Chinese politics is a pendulum swinging very widely. From Tienanmen Square and Tank Man, it had swung quite a bit the other way. But today, it's come back 180-degrees. Xi is really trying for a Cultural Revolution 2.0.
These impressions largely match what I hear from other Chinese immigrants - except for Party members, who tend not to want to talk about it at all. I'm afraid that you've been listening to too much propaganda.
the sense i get from my chinese friends are that the CCP is an annoying parent but they understand the challenges both domestic and international and largely agree with the compromises
Do they either clam up or act like it's a mortal insult to suggest that an independent democratic nation should not live in fear of impending violent conquest?
Because that's the kind of reaction that makes the reports of "happy life, all's good" a little harder to digest.
Not saying that's a unanimous opinion / response, of course. But it certainly seems to be the default.
It bears repeating that I do not presume a monolithic opinion of the citizens of China or the culturally Chinese diaspora.
I balance that against the reactions and attitudes that I do experience, in proportion to how often I experience them.
Chinese living in a foreign country, or Chinese willing to discuss such issues with you in China is a highly biased sample set. That is high school math you suppose to learn at the age of 17.
Are you saying you would've been neutral on an invasion of Taiwan before 1985 or so, since it wasn't a democracy?
> because literally every other person in her extended family was in prison or work camp
translate for you - her family was heavily involved in politics, it is just unlucky that her family was not on the winning side, so she hates whatever happened.
posting from Shanghai, going back to the 3rd world west in a few days.
Is it generally normal to hold countries accountable for every person that dies due to their COVID policies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_a...
While the rest of the world was doing stuff like ensuring that as many of its citizens as possible were vaccinated, and letting the population gradually work up to herd immunity so that controls could be gradually loosened, China kept the population at a hard lockdown right to late 2022, and then opened up completely. It was as if they just opened the floodgates.
There were actually people arguing that China was doing this intentionally, with the plan being to thin out the top-heavy aging demographic in the country. I'm not necessarily advocating for this theory, but illustrating that the very fact that there's a colorable argument for it demonstrates how irresponsible Chinese leadership were.
The result was that in my father-in-law's retirement home, literally EVERY caretaker came down with the virus together, which obviously led to most of the residents getting sick. And given the way covid worked, that meant a whole lot of deaths.
Adding insult to injury, his death certificate attributes the cause of death to heart disease. As a matter of policy, all deaths were attributed to any other condition the patient might have had, however trivial, unless covid could be proven. And proving it would involve in declining to properly dispose of the body, paying for the autopsy and so forth. But there's no doubt (having talked to him every day on Skype) that covid is what killed him.
The zero-Covid policy kept Covid out of the country until an effective vaccine was developed and deployed to about 90% of the population. The main problem was that there's a widespread belief in East Asia (including in Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) that vaccination is dangerous for old people, so the vaccination rate was lowest among the most vulnerable group. A lot of old people simply refused to get vaccinated, despite large vaccination drives and public messaging asking them to do so.
Then, as you said, the zero-Covid policy was eliminated overnight, and practically everyone in the country got Covid within 1-2 months. However, because most people were vaccinated, the death rate was far lower than in the West.
All in all, the zero-Covid policy saved several million lives in China. This is based on retrospective studies by outside researchers, not on official statistics.
You haven't addressed at all the parts about blacklisting whole families for political reasons, or horrible return-to-normal policies for covid-19 three years ago, or the general pendulum-swing-back-to-evil trend.
Your wife feels a certain way and wanted to avoid a certain hypothetical. But since it didn't happen, we have no way of knowing how relevant these feelings are.
How can we address blacklisting and covid response if you are insisting that any comparison isn't relevant and that we should evaluate it with no baseline?
Sensationalizing claims then qualifying them later is inherently dishonest.
To the extent that's true, it's because they won't let you see the uyghur reeducation camps.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85qihtvw6e/the-faces-from-c...
https://gijn.org/stories/interview-uyghur-victims-xinjiang-p...
How about the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights?
The Xinjiang Police Files: A 2022 leak of over 5,000 police photos, internal documents, and spreadsheets revealing the scale of detention, with images showing prisoners shackled, hooded, and under guard in 2018.
The China Cables (2019): Leaked, classified instructions on how to run the camps, including directives to ensure "no escapes" promote "repentance" and use full video surveillance.
Satellite Imagery Analysis: Researchers from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) identified over 380 suspected detention sites, including new construction and expansion, often featuring guard towers and razor wire.
Testimonies and Research: Former detainees have reported torture, rape, forced sterilization, and intense indoctrination to abandon their religious and cultural practices.
Government Documentation: The Karakax list, a leaked document, provided detailed, case-by-case justifications for detention, such as having too many children or wearing a veil.
Are you this incredulous when someone reports that the US locks up more Black people capita than White? Someone defending the US could make the same claims you are that everyone is out to make the US look bad. That multiple independent groups are fabricating evidence etc…
1. give links or one link to the collection of above "evidence" to let others to get conclusion by their own. BTW, I've seen some ("Leaked, classified instructions...) but easily get different interpretation.
2. Also using "I" is better than "We". That means you get your conclusion, not representing others.
2. Lecturing random people you meet like they're a freshman English student is patronizing.
Why should I take the denials of a pseudnonymous online account without evidence?
I'm guessing the next part of your conspiracy theory is that the conspiracy group is so powerful that everyone is scared to come forward. But if they are that powerful, why construct such an ineffective anti-china story? Surely such a powerful group could construct something more damaging.
Would love to know how that works in a country that outlaws christian churches that aren't tied to the state.
https://gijn.org/stories/interview-uyghur-victims-xinjiang-p...
In addition to releasing the report she released a 131 page Chinese rebuttal simultaneously. Not the actions one would expect of a shadowy group at the UN out to get China.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/31/china-uyghur-m...
The organization’s human rights office delivered its much-delayed report minutes before Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, was to leave office.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/world/asia/un-china-xinji...
The internet archive lists the first time they archived the document as August 31 22:23 GMT, which was August 31 23:23 in Geneva. That matches the reporting from NYT and Guardian from the next morning. Both of those reports are also available on the internet archive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220701000000*/https://www.ohch...
Or it could be that the same government of China that less than 40 years ago admitted to killing 200 protesters and likely killed at least 2500, has severe restrictions on religious freedom, and is known for targeting family members of activists and dissidents, is also rounding up and reeducating members of a very publicly troublesome minority group.
They have a well documented history of similar tactics in Tibet over the last 75 years or so. I mean there have been over 150 Tibetans who have self immolated just in the last decade and a half as a protest against Chinese actions in Tibet. I can't think of very many acts of self-immolation protests where the target government wasn't doing something untoward, much less when there's an average of 10 per year.
Given the recent history of the Chinese government response to dissidents, and the terrorist attacks perpetuated by Uyghurs in the 2010s, I'd honestly be surprised if China didn't do something similar to what is alleged.
Do you think that the United States lets dignitaries from other countries tour ICE detention camps?
You think Adrian Zenz convinced dozens of respected journalists and news organizations to lie about interviewing hundreds of victims?
You think he manufactured the Xinjian police file leaks, or the China cable leaks?
You think he altered UN fertility data to show that the fertility rate in Xinjian declined by 50% in 2 years?
You think he tricked the UN in to releasing their report?
I’d also like to see a source for the most mosques claim that isn’t Chinese state media. For someone so suspicious of western media you seem to have readily swallowed actual direct Chinese government propaganda hook line and sinker.
Also is ASPI supposed to have a Zenz association because I didn't see one:
>We are grateful for the advice and assistance of a range of global experts on Xinjiang including Maya Wang from Human Rights Watch, Dr Timothy Grose from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Dr Darren Byler of the University of Colorado Boulder.
Once I started criticizing Libs of TikTok, the propaganda arm for this administration, and getting traction with users, my account was locked and now I have to scan my face and ID if I want to use it again.
You have to toe the party line here, too.
(The first half is obviously true, the second part isn't)
To your point I've seen something similar with Deepseek, generic answers start printing and then, in plain sight, removed and replaced with a non committal message along the lines of "I don't have access to that information."
I was talking crap about china from the great wall.
Personally as a Dutch person it is amusing as all hell hoe goddamn triggered everyone gets about Israel- truly mindblowing.
The disproportion between how this people express they opposition and how Chinese officials track them is HUGE. This very much feel unnecessary.
It was here: https://www.france.tv/france-2/envoye-special/5971095-la-chi...
One hopes the CIA/Secret service would be willing to provide the human to do the reviewing but sadly I've worked for European telco's and I know better.
Can you elaborate?
Truly a paradise for american intelligence. Would have expected that the chinese officials be briefed on not using us tech companies, but opsec is hard to teach, and even harder to always follow.
How can you not trust them.
I never got to the end of the Terms & Conditions myself.
It's basically an OSINT siphon.
In this Chinese case, the tokens are leaked at least twice. ChatGPT offers no direct access to the Chinese, they have to use some kind of Openrouter-like service, but the data where also in clear-text during transmission.
(I kid, mostly. While the US certainly isn't pure, its scale of surveillance intrusion is light compared to China)
I assume that for someone to believe this, they either have to believe the U.S. has poorer surveillance capability than China, or, more likely, they consider U.S. surveillance unintrusive and Chinese surveillance intrusive.
Of course. What's the point of surveillance if you're not going to use it to enforce dogma? I think you can reasonably evaluate a country's surveillance by looking at the pettiness of the arrests & censorship they make.
See this chinese tech reviewer[1] being bullied by the government for putting a spotlight on chinese phone makers cheating about benchmarks. I'm not sure the US is at this point yet...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1rfw6oj/hardware_...
Plenty of signs point towards this being a case where it wasn't the government, so it's not a good example. Instead it looks to have been the tech companies filing takedowns and threatening lawsuits. Especially when it comes to China, this is a big difference.
You should've pointed towards more clear-cut examples like Naomi Wu and Peng Shuai. But those cases are less unthinkable in the US, and it should be uncontroversial to say that it's what's been worked towards.
They just gave up a source that could have provided info for years.
Will OpenAI release the same for other government officials from any other states?
I can't wait to see Starmer's chats with ChatGPT.
Anyway, all of this smells like 1934, "accusing them of what we are already doing"
There's something poetic about OpenAI being asked to comment on mis-use of their slop generator, and their answer is composed entirely of AI slop.
I can't imagine the amount of government secrets, trade secrets, business plans, personal secrets, etc that people divulge on there.
I hope those victims of immigration impersonation don't have family within China's borders. AI-enabled impersonation and intimidation are far from the worst of China's crimes [1] against its overseas critics.
China likes to make you an offer you can't refuse [2] [3]: You're saying stuff the Chinese government doesn't like, but you live outside its borders and the secret police can't get at you? You need to come to China and be jailed (or worse). If you don't, your family will be the ones who are jailed (or worse). Or you can unalive yourself, and save the glorious Chinese Communist Party the expense of a bullet.
[1] China would say "the government punishes a criminal's family" is not a crime, it's a perfectly legal implementation of government policy under Chinese law. I respond that the death camps were perfectly legal implementation of government policy under Nazi law, but were still crimes against humanity -- China's actions fall in this category of crimes.
As I understand it: Western societies have a very individualistic view of responsibility. If you didn't commit a crime, you're innocent. Punishing the innocent family members of a criminal is morally abominable.
In the Chinese Communist Party's view, criminal responsibility is collectivist. By their definition, the family members of a criminal share responsibility for the crime regardless of their participation in the criminal acts. "Innocent family members of a criminal" is a logically inconsistent concept in their world view. The family of a criminal is guilty by definition -- being related to a criminal is itself a crime.
This is sickening to me.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fox_Hunt
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-08/fbi-chief-says-china-...
If you still needed a reason to look into self hosted models, it'd be tough to find a better one than this.
Does this level of detail seem strange to anybody else? Shining such a strong light on OpenAI's moderation/manual review efforts seems like it would draw unwanted attention to the fact that ChatGPT conversations are anything but private, and seems somewhat at odds with their recent outrage about the subpoena for user chats in the NYT case.
Manual reviews of sensitive data are ok as long as their own employees are the reviewers, I suppose?
> By examining request metadata, we were able to trace these accounts to specific researchers at the lab.
> The volume, structure, and focus of the prompts were distinct from normal usage patterns
Clearly some employees of Anthropic personally looked at individual inputs and outputs of their API
The level of detail does not seem surprising. they're both charged with maintaining a facade of privacy while eliminating any and all miss-use. Certainly they heavily analyze basically everything given to them.
And generally as a society we've been ok with basically zero privacy as long as the data we send stays inside the company we sent it too. Google reads all your emails? Sure thing, read away, just don't send them to the popo. Apple knows when you're ovulating? no problem, just don't tell Amazon. etc
If you've ever ran a SaaS business, you know this and you know you can have "God Mode" access to everything, even if you swear up and down that you don't/won't.
The owners of these models aren't your friends, they see you as objects. They want to take as much value as they possibly can from you and will starve you if/when the option appears. That includes selling and sharing whatever data they have on you to the highest bidders, and some of those bidders want scapegoats to parade around as domestic terrorists.
The fact that companies are willing to send their IP and business processes to entities that can easily launder it and out compete them is mind-boggling, as well.
When contracting out manufacturing, it's common sense to spread across manufacturers, so no single manufacturer has everything. They may have half a shell. Or an peripheral module without the core. Or a core without anything around it.
Other than that the approach in general is weak, most people likely generate lots of noise themselves. It's just about that one time you asked about X.