There is an Alibaba LLM that won’t respond to questions about Tienanmen Square at all, just saying it can’t reply.

I hate censored LLMs that don’t allow an answer to follow political norms of what is acceptable. It’s such a slippery slope towards technological thought-police Orwellian restrictions on topics. I don’t like it when China does it or when the US does it and when US companies do it, they imply that this is ethically acceptable.

Fortunately, there are many LLMs that aren’t censored.

I would rather have an Alibaba LLM just say “Tienanmen Square resulted in fatalities but capitalism is extremely mean to people so the cruelty was justified” and get some sort of brutal but at least honest opinion, or outright deny it if that’s their position. I suppose the reality is any answer on the topic by the LLM would result in problems from Chinese censors.

I used to be a somewhat extreme capitalist, but capitalism somewhat lost me when they started putting up the anti-homeless architecture. Spikes on the ground to keep people from sleeping? If this is the outcome of capitalism, I need to either adopt a different political position or more misanthropy.

Gemini is such a bad LLM from everything I’ve seen and read that it’s hard to know if this sort of censorship is an error or a feature.

In defense of Gemini, from my unfortunate dealings with Social Workers, I found many of them were lazy and inefficient and extracted a lot of resources from society without providing that much value back. There are seemed to be few objective measurements for whether they improved outcomes in quantifiable comparable ways.

In this situation you have a social worker in training, already a lazy and inefficient profession, who is so lazy and unethical they are having AI do all their classwork. This is early in their career, when they are supposed to be bright-eyed and eager to help.

I don’t like Gemini as much as other models, but what if Gemini was being honest and making a valid point?