A Chinese official’s use of ChatGPT revealed an intimidation operation
91 points - today at 3:52 PM
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It was here: https://www.france.tv/france-2/envoye-special/5971095-la-chi...
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?
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.
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.
If you still needed a reason to look into self hosted models, it'd be tough to find a better one than this.
I can't imagine the amount of government secrets, trade secrets, business plans, personal secrets, etc that people divulge on there.