[HN Gopher] A Chinese official's use of ChatGPT revealed an inti...
___________________________________________________________________
A Chinese official's use of ChatGPT revealed an intimidation
operation
Author : cwwc
Score : 245 points
Date : 2026-02-27 15:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| upupupandaway wrote:
| I was in Shanghai recently and while casually testing one of
| their AI chat bots I typed "What do you think of the situation in
| Taiwan?".
|
| 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.
| titaniumtown wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Was this on your personal device? I'm just wondering how it
| activated your camera. I would love more details!
| anvuong wrote:
| Yeah that part is either just bullshit or OP gave the bot
| access to his camera previously, which is just dumb.
| sixseven wrote:
| The story smells like bullshit to me.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| OP might have meant that it asked for camera permission. Or
| OP might have set camera permission to auto allow but then
| that is also stupid (more so).
| Justitia wrote:
| I would not be surprised if they just activated the camera
| 3rodents wrote:
| If this were true, why didn't the chatbot immediately recognize
| that the word "Taiwan" should trigger the response? Detecting
| the word "Taiwan" has been possible since before most of us
| were born.
|
| 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.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| This is manifestly false.
|
| 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.
| hungryhobo wrote:
| i don't doubt your experience, but just know it might be
| skewed and not representative of everyone's opinions
|
| 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
| elefanten wrote:
| How do they feel about and respond when asked about the
| Taiwan question?
|
| 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.
| fasbiner wrote:
| The majority of US support for Taiwan and it's current
| situation is owed entirely to supporting a military junta
| from the mainland that massacred the local Taiwainese who
| objected to it and suppressed civil society.
|
| Are you saying you would've been neutral on an invasion
| of Taiwan before 1985 or so, since it wasn't a democracy?
| elefanten wrote:
| I am categorically against invasions and conquest of land
| by force. We live in the year 2026, not the year 1985. I
| set my priorities accordingly.
| tw1984 wrote:
| > not the year 1985
|
| US launched attack on Iran today using an aircraft
| carrier constructed in 1984.
| kdheiwns wrote:
| About 50% of Chinese people I meet very much agree with
| the government that it's part of China and always has
| been. The other 50% know that it's clearly independent
| and are tired of the whole act by the Chinese government.
| But the people I've talked to about this are people with
| the means to travel, and many of them have been to
| Taiwan. So it may not be representative of the typical
| person on the street. I've been to China several times
| and I don't want to ask it there, but that's less out of
| fear of the government but more than I don't want to
| bother locals with politics and present myself as an
| enlightened foreigner, since nobody likes that shit. Just
| like nobody would like a Chinese guy going to Alabama and
| telling the people they need to embrace socialism if they
| ever want to escape poverty.
| elefanten wrote:
| Thank you for sharing, that is interesting to hear.
|
| 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.
| tw1984 wrote:
| > The other 50% know that it's clearly independent and
| are tired of the whole act by the Chinese government.
|
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| > Her father died as a direct result of Chinese Covid
| policy.
|
| 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...
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| No. But there are actual circumstances here that differ
| between China's actions and the rest of the planet.
| Specifically...
|
| 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.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| China's policy reduced the death rate by a factor of
| about 75% relative to the US.
|
| 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.
| gscott wrote:
| Depends if the Government welds your apartment gate shut
| and lets you burn to death.
| vkou wrote:
| Did that happen to a lot of people? Do you have a source?
| gscott wrote:
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/news/china/poli
| tic...
|
| https://www.caixinglobal.com/2022-11-06/woman-falls-to-
| her-d...
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/04/24/shanghai-blockades-
| covid...
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.5478668
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Nice sample size of 1
| tw1984 wrote:
| Cultural Revolution is all about totally politicalised
| society, extremely polarised, regular people fight against
| each other based on ideologies. Isn't that the current
| west?
|
| > 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.
| sarchertech wrote:
| >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.
|
| To the extent that's true, it's because they won't let you
| see the uyghur reeducation camps.
| MaxPock wrote:
| We can get videos from remote hellholes of Africa like
| Dafur and Mali but apparently,that's too much to ask in
| Xinjiang.We can't even get satellite images to show us
| evidence of this so called wigur genocide
| sarchertech wrote:
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-01/satellite-images-
| expo...
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85qihtvw6e/the-faces-
| from-c...
| xanthor wrote:
| If you didn't have British Crown state media wrapping a
| narrative around these images you wouldn't think anything
| of them.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Would you take a group of Swiss journalists?
|
| https://gijn.org/stories/interview-uyghur-victims-
| xinjiang-p...
|
| How about the UN Office of the High Commissioner for
| Human Rights?
| xanthor wrote:
| Why should I take the claims of journalists without
| evidence?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Because it's their job? Because it's corroborated by
| multiple other journalists and even a UN report?
|
| Why should I take the denials of a pseudnonymous online
| account without evidence?
| xanthor wrote:
| Can you imagine a journalist who would lie for any
| possible reason?
| sarchertech wrote:
| Can you imagine hundreds of journalists who would lie to
| promote a false story that hasn't really been all that
| effective and harming China (the only possible motivation
| for such a campaign). _And_ not a single one of the
| journalists approached by the creators of this campaign
| leaked anything. If this really was a massive conspiracy
| theory, that itself is a much much bigger story than the
| Chinese rounding up people that most of the world don 't
| seem to care about. One of those hundreds of journalists
| wouldn't have been able to resist such a scoop.
|
| 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.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Sure. I can also much more easily imagine pseudnonymous
| accounts making material misrepresentations for
| politically motivated reasons, spreading FUD about
| journalists making things up.
| sarchertech wrote:
| So here's some of the evidence that we have
|
| 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...
| jjcc wrote:
| I would suggest:
|
| 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.
| sarchertech wrote:
| 1. I've provided a half dozen links in this thread. Feel
| free to google for more if you want them. Most of the
| people I'm replying to will respond with some variation
| of "funded by nefarious group x" regardless of what links
| are posted.
|
| 2. Lecturing random people you meet like they're a
| freshman English student is patronizing.
| Thlom wrote:
| On the other hand you can travel to Xinjiang, visit
| mosques, Uighur museums, experience Uighur culture,
| observe Uighurs just minding their own business in their
| daily life.
| sarchertech wrote:
| "Subjected to arbitrary arrests and forced labor,
| sterilizations to torture, more than one million Uyghurs,
| Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other minorities are estimated to
| have been locked up in so-called "re-education" camps and
| prisons in the region over the last decade, according to
| the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights."
|
| https://gijn.org/stories/interview-uyghur-victims-
| xinjiang-p...
| xanthor wrote:
| UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Michelle Bachelet
| actually visited Xinjiang and made no such assertions.
| Whoever did release the report you're referencing, they
| waited until immediately after her term ended to release
| it (within hours). Pretty conspicuous.
| sarchertech wrote:
| No it was actually released hours before her term ended
| not after. And the reason she held off releasing until
| the last minute is because of pressure from China to
| refrain from releasing it.
|
| 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.
| xanthor wrote:
| No it was released Sept 1 Geneva time, and her term ended
| Aug 31.
| sarchertech wrote:
| "Bachelet's damning report was published with only 11
| minutes to go before her term came to an end at midnight
| Geneva time. Publication was delayed by the eleventh-hour
| delivery of an official Chinese response that contained
| names and pictures of individuals that had to be blacked
| out by the UN commissioner's office for privacy and
| safety reasons."
|
| 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...
| xanthor wrote:
| I agree it was reported this way, but do we have evidence
| it was actually prepared and published by her at that
| time? The report conspicuously does not mention the
| viewpoint and concerns of the High Commissioner as other
| OHCHR reports do nor does it reference Bachelet's
| findings from her May 2021 visit to Xinjiang.
| sarchertech wrote:
| So you don't have any evidence it was published the next
| day? You just made that up out of whole cloth?
|
| 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.o
| hch...
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > visit mosques
|
| Would love to know how that works in a country that
| outlaws christian churches that aren't tied to the state.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_church_(China)
| analog8374 wrote:
| What's the coordinates? I want to look at it on Google maps
| sarchertech wrote:
| Here you go
|
| https://xjdp.aspi.org.au/map/?
| hungryhobo wrote:
| nice, funded by ASPI, that's all i needed to know
| sarchertech wrote:
| There could be a grand global conspiracy to push this
| story about how the Chinese are persecuting the Uyghurs,
| involving the US government, the Australian government,
| the United Nations, France, the UK, A Swiss journalism
| consortium, private companies, thousands of Chinese
| expats, satellite companies, newspapers, and television
| reports, which seems to have very little payoff because
| most people don't care about it at all.
|
| 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.
| hungryhobo wrote:
| Nah just the lunatic Adrian Zenz. Feel free to ignore the
| fact Muslim countries actually visited xinjiang and
| agreed there was no concentration camps. Like believe the
| crap you want, but Uighur language is literally on
| display in every road sign, every metro station, every
| shop. Xinjiang has the highest density of mosques in the
| world. College admissions offer incentives to people of
| Uighur origin. Ppl can just go to xinjiang and see it for
| themselves
| sarchertech wrote:
| Do you think that Spanish street signs and Catholic
| Churches in El Paso prove that the United States isn't
| detaining thousands of Hispanic immigrants?
|
| 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.
| glenstein wrote:
| He we go with the Zenz talking point again. I've never
| understood the fixation, especially when most of the time
| when this gets talked about is drawing from a vast trove
| independent documents that have nothing to do with him,
| from everywhere from human rights, watch to the
| international criminal court to diverse reporting. Yet
| somehow the only response to all of this is Zenz, Zenz,
| Zenz.
|
| 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.
| 3371 wrote:
| There's literally someone filmed the camp and fled from
| China, his name is Guan Heng
| gs17 wrote:
| > If this were true, why didn't the chatbot immediately
| recognize that the word "Taiwan" should trigger the response?
|
| 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/1
| ic3kl6/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.red
| dit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1i7ceol/...
| recursive wrote:
| I've seen it from the non-Chinese ChatGPT before. Something
| was deemed to be violating the sensitivity filters or
| something, and it refused to answer. But only _after_ I saw
| part of the real answer streamed to the output, and then
| redacted and replaced.
| KHRZ wrote:
| DeepSeek would print all it's mental gymnastics to censor
| itself in the reasoning phase directly to the user, before
| shutting down the conversation. Apparantly such an odd move
| is a thing in China.
| glenstein wrote:
| Right, I think deepseek continues to be massively
| misunderstood. It appears to be a replication of existing
| technologies done more efficiently rather than a
| breakthrough in terms of bootstrapping from the ground up
| with new capabilities. And at this point people will start
| saying "well does that matter?" and the answer is yes.
| libertine wrote:
| You can trigger that behavior with Deepseek, just try it
| yourself.
| jajuuka wrote:
| I love Hacker News fiction. Wild stuff. haha
| imwillofficial wrote:
| This risk is far overstated.
|
| I was talking crap about china from the great wall.
| expedition32 wrote:
| You can't yell Free Palestine or the BBC will mute you...
|
| Personally as a Dutch person it is amusing as all hell hoe
| goddamn triggered everyone gets about Israel- truly
| mindblowing.
| deaux wrote:
| Did everyone clap and Albert Einstein hand you a crisp $10
| bill? You should use that to make the bet you mentioned!
|
| (The first half is obviously true, the second part isn't)
| raven12345 wrote:
| Can you tell what AI chat bots are you using? as i know all
| chat in China just block answer, no apps will activate camera
| and ask for information
| holoduke wrote:
| Which chat bot?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I ran an anonymized Facebook account for years with thousands
| of followers that mainly sticks to news and politics.
|
| 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.
| ZeroAurora wrote:
| Nice bad story. Make up one better next time.
| glenstein wrote:
| >Given the bot started printing the Western consensus first, I
| bet $10 it was trained by distilling ChatGPT or Gemini.
|
| 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."
| mrdependable wrote:
| Wow, our surveillance helped take down their surveillance. Yay, I
| guess?
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| "Our glorious oversight vs their barbaric surveillance"
|
| (I kid, mostly. While the US certainly isn't pure, its scale of
| surveillance intrusion is light compared to China)
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > 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.
| kvuj wrote:
| > ... 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/hard
| ware_...
| deaux wrote:
| > 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...
|
| 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.
| kvuj wrote:
| Geekerwan confirmed that it was a "greater force", not a
| manufacturer.
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| More interesting than the fact that ChatGPT was used, was seeing
| all the specific examples of the types of work that this
| individual was doing.
| DANmode wrote:
| Where can they be found?
| layer8 wrote:
| I wonder what exactly the trigger conditions are that lead to the
| chats of an account being human-reviewed by OpenAI.
| simlevesque wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they can just prompt any convo in the
| background and ask "is this conversation sensitive ?" and the
| model can answer without this being added to the context of the
| convo.
| spwa4 wrote:
| "Is this someone important enough to spy on?"
|
| 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.
| dlev_pika wrote:
| Sounds like Anthropic is fighting this exact battle, and DOD
| is arguing they don't want to do that lol
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| > sadly I've worked for European telco's and I know better
|
| Can you elaborate?
| LightBug1 wrote:
| This is -the- question.
| coliveira wrote:
| So, it seems they're openly admitting that OpenAI is a
| surveillance mechanism used at the discretion of the US gov.
| morkalork wrote:
| Such a hot topic these days:
| https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/chatgpt-and-the-tumbler...
| layer8 wrote:
| This is the report on which the CNN article is based (which it
| doesn't link to):
| https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/df438d70-e3fe-4a6c-a403-ff632def8...
| gitpusher wrote:
| > "This is what Chinese modern transnational repression looks
| like," Ben Nimmo, principal investigator at OpenAI, told
| reporters ahead of the report's release. "It's not just digital.
| It's not just about trolling. It's industrialized. [...]
|
| 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.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The more of it they and others put out, the more normalized and
| acceptable it becomes. The next generations will even think in
| slop.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > "It's not just digital. It's not just about trolling. It's
| industrialized. It's about trying to hit critics of the CCP
| [Chinese Communist Party] with everything, everywhere, all at
| once."
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| Pushing aside the fact that OpenAI is just a tool of the US
| regime.
|
| 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"
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| there are multiple states mentioned in the report, so yes
| hungryhobo wrote:
| Mostly non aligned countries with the US
| direwolf20 wrote:
| For them, not of them. ChatGPT releases information on the
| US's enemies to the US. Will it release information on
| France's enemies to France?
| guelo wrote:
| I'm assuming they would not disclose such campaigns by the US
| government.
|
| I can't imagine the amount of government secrets, trade secrets,
| business plans, personal secrets, etc that people divulge on
| there.
| kykat wrote:
| The amount of information about everything that people are giving
| OpenAI is astronomical, information that was previously kept
| closely guarded is now just freely flowing through foreign
| servers.
|
| 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.
| simmerup wrote:
| But the american silicon valley nerds pinky swear not to look!
|
| How can you not trust them.
| bucketdeveloper wrote:
| Did they though?
|
| I never got to the end of the Terms & Conditions myself.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| The T&C's promise they will look.
| dlev_pika wrote:
| Crazy to me that Chinese officials use ChatGPT to discuss
| sensitive operations lmao
| tehjoker wrote:
| i kinda get the impression this was from 2023 and also it is not
| clear what this dissident did, hard to evaluate whether i should
| care without knowing that
| romulussilvia wrote:
| I remember a while back when a few cars with CCP decals driving
| around SoCal to intimidate some dissidents!
| leonflexo wrote:
| > Chinese operators allegedly disguised themselves as US
| immigration officials
| lxgr wrote:
| This seems to be the source report:
| https://openai.com/index/disrupting-malicious-ai-uses/ (since it
| would of course kill CNN, like almost all media outlets, to link
| to a non-affiliated primary source...)
|
| 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?
| coliveira wrote:
| Yes, it is either a lie or an admission that OpenAI is a global
| surveillance mechanism.
| andai wrote:
| Alas! My vision of One Fed Per Child hath come to pass!
| jajuuka wrote:
| This feels very planted. Wouldn't be surprised if this some
| attempt to look patriotic with the DoW turning up the heat
| against Anthropic.
| erhuve wrote:
| given that OpenAI just nabbed the contract, I'd say that's
| spot on
| ticulatedspline wrote:
| that creepy feeling of "being watched" has mostly kept me from
| taking advantage of any SOTA models, i only dabble in a few
| local ones.
|
| 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
| amelius wrote:
| I use my local models to generate input for the SOTA models,
| so there is enough noise that the companies don't know what
| is real or not :)
| comboy wrote:
| Get list of your inputs mixed with generated ones and ask
| some model to tell you which ones are yours.
|
| 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.
| msh wrote:
| The signal founder is doing private llm's at confer.to
| asymmetric wrote:
| Have you tried it? I've been meaning to.
| msh wrote:
| Yes. Somewhat expensive given its web only (no api) but
| it works very well and new features are added
| continuously.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Same here. My assumption is that anything sent to a hosted
| model is public information, it will be trained on and it
| will be collated with your identity. And even if public
| models have guardrails that prevent that information from
| being regurgitated as slop, every
| CEO/owner/investor/government/etc will all have access to the
| uncensored models that include _everything_.
|
| 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.
| edg5000 wrote:
| If you own a store and people walk in, you observe this and
| take a mental note. You know who visits the store. If you
| sell tokens, you know who buys and what people buy. It's
| just that now, the metadata (what I buy, when I buy, what I
| look like) and my intrinsics (my data) are one. I send
| tokens, get tokens back. If there was a way to round-robin
| somehow across vendors to control who gets what, I'd do it.
|
| 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.
| Palmik wrote:
| From Anthropics recent blog post:
| https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
|
| > 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
| alwa wrote:
| I thought that was pretty open? Even their more privacy-
| oriented Zero Data Retention agreement (which isn't so easy
| to get on your business account) includes an exception "where
| needed to comply with law or combat misuse"
| bdangubic wrote:
| in the year 2026 is there really _anyone_ out there still who
| thinks that _anything_ they do online is private on _any_ way?
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Very creepy on the part of Open AI. Glad I don't use chatgpt
| _ache_ wrote:
| In France we have a report on Chinese officials abusing
| diplomatic rights to oppress Chinese critics (from Chineses
| expatriated people).
|
| 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...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-prS7BlLpI
| gigel82 wrote:
| Holy dystopian f*k. So not only does ChatGPT record all
| interactions, it actually leaks them to the press when they see
| fit?
|
| If you still needed a reason to look into self hosted models,
| it'd be tough to find a better one than this.
| ipcress_file wrote:
| Why did they ban the user rather than informing American
| intelligence and continuing to monitor the user?
|
| They just gave up a source that could have provided info for
| years.
| plagiarist wrote:
| If I were doing this sort of thing, I would make certain to ban
| accounts that were too obvious while leaving ones that are
| subtle enough, so that the other side has less reason to
| suspect I am tracking their inputs and feeding them
| disinformation.
| ipcress_file wrote:
| Good point. Perhaps that's what's happened here.
| est wrote:
| I think one of the reasons why AI companies are valued this high
| is one can actually inspect what user inputs & outputs are.
|
| 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.
| nameconflicts wrote:
| China has hundreds of Fortune Global 500 companies and ranks
| second in GDP. But these have nothing to do with ordinary people.
| csense wrote:
| > intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by
| impersonating US immigration officials
|
| 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-...
| chenzhekl wrote:
| This tells us that we should never share sensitive information
| with GPT, even if you've set it not to use your data for
| training. Nothing can stop OpenAI from misusing your data.
| titaniumrain wrote:
| lol everyone claims deepseek and all chinese companies are
| collecting private information and ban them in western companies.
| but it is okay being spied by openai :)))
| edg5000 wrote:
| I like DeepSeek because of their pricing, although I'm still
| evaluating. I wonder if I'll need a VPN in the future to access
| it though (from EU). Cheap is good, cheap prevails.
|
| The official DeepSeek API is routed through AWS load balancing
| btw.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Well someone's getting fired, hopefully not literally.
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