Big tech is well aware of this, and much of their industry, relies on this. Many people reading this will know this to be true, and are very saddened by this, but keep their mouths shut, because they are 1. comfy 2. smart (we all know it does not matter)
This is such common knowledge that I feel kind of cringe even posting about this, but I am not being given a choice, nor a choice in this edit.
Edit: If anybody wants to chat to somebody who has had his organism compromised by what is, very deniablely, an intelligence agency (or a system/organization intelligence agency adjacent), just reply to this comment. They have not treated me too poorly.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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?
How can you not trust them.
I was talking crap about china from the great wall.
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.
Was this on your personal device? I'm just wondering how it activated your camera. I would love more details!
(I kid, mostly. While the US certainly isn't pure, its scale of surveillance intrusion is light compared to China)
> 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
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.
A sprawling Chinese influence operation — accidentally revealed by a Chinese law enforcement official’s use of ChatGPT — focused on intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials, according to a new report from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
The Chinese law enforcement official used ChatGPT like a diary to document the alleged covert campaign of suppression, OpenAI said. In one instance, Chinese operators allegedly disguised themselves as US immigration officials to warn a US-based Chinese dissident that their public statements had supposedly broken the law, according to the ChatGPT user. In another case, they describe an effort to use forged documents from a US county court to try to get a Chinese dissident’s social media account taken down.
The report offers one of the most vivid examples yet of how authoritarian regimes can use AI tools to document their censorship efforts. The influence operation appeared to involve hundreds of Chinese operators and thousands of fake online accounts on various social media platforms, according to OpenAI.
“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. It’s about trying to hit critics of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] with everything, everywhere, all at once.”
CNN has requested comment on the report from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC.
ChatGPT served as a journal for the Chinese operative to keep track of the covert network, while much of the network’s content was generated by other tools and spread through social media accounts and websites. OpenAI banned the user after discovering the activity.
OpenAI’s investigators were able to match descriptions from the ChatGPT user with real-world online activity and impact. The user described an effort to fake the death of a Chinese dissident by creating a phony obituary and photos of a gravestone and posting them online. False rumors of the dissident’s death did indeed surfaced online in 2023, according to a Chinese-language Voice of America article.
In another case, the ChatGPT user asked the AI agent to draw up a multi-part plan to denigrate the incoming Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, in part by fanning online anger about US tariffs on Japanese goods. ChatGPT refused to respond to the prompt, according to OpenAI. But in late October, as Takaichi took power, hashtags emerged on a popular forum for Japanese graphic artists attacking her and complaining about US tariffs, according to OpenAI.
The report comes amid a battle between the US and China for supremacy over AI. At stake is how the technology is used on the battlefield and in the boardroom of the world’s two biggest economies.
The Pentagon is in a standoff with another prominent AI company, Anthropic, over the use of its AI model. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has given Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a Friday deadline to comply with demands to peel back safeguards on its AI model or risk losing a lucrative Pentagon contract.
The report from OpenAI “clearly demonstrates the way that China is actively employing AI tools to enhance information operations,” Michael Horowitz, a former Pentagon official focused on emerging technologies, told CNN.
“US-China AI competition is continuing to intensify,” said Horowtiz, who is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “This competition is not just taking place at the frontier, but in how China’s government is planning and implementing the day-to-day of their surveillance and information apparatus.”
I never got to the end of the Terms & Conditions myself.
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
When governments and their major corporations level accusations at countries that are regarded as official enemies, you have to ask two questions (1) what is the actual evidence and (2) what is the level of impact
Meanwhile when you want to ask about U.S. influence operations... like they time we probably killed a lot of people by spreading disinformation about the COVID vaccine because we didn't want China to look good.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/14/pentagon-ran-secret...
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.
To the extent that's true, it's because they won't let you see the uyghur reeducation camps.
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.
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.
Can you elaborate?
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
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
Compared to the U.S. which currently has no foreign nationals detained illegally?
Pick any country and you will find political dissidents. The existence of angry emigrants is not evidence that a country is worse than we could ever imagine.
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.
https://gijn.org/stories/interview-uyghur-victims-xinjiang-p...
https://gijn.org/stories/interview-uyghur-victims-xinjiang-p...
How about the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights?
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.