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?
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”
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
An increasing use of AI is to gather user feedback. The Chatbot UI detected an error state, and then loaded a feedback vendor, who then popped the camera open for their interactive feedback session
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
I'd suspect rather than interactive feedback, it might have been trying to let him log in with a QR code. "A popup opened and wanted me to submit my information" sounds like a login/registration form.
What are you talking about? Why are you using imprecise language like "popped the camera open?"
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.
> Or could you retract your statement and clarify that you did grant camera permissions for that site previously?
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.
Sorry, I think of HN as a technical forum where people prize precision.
I think that when you informally bolster lies of omission with your own imprecise language agreeing with it, that harms the quality of discussion and creates pointless confusion. I think you get less benefit of the doubt if you do that routinely. By your own admission you do that routinely since you use this as a place to speak informally in a casual web discussion where you are often imprecise or lie by omission.
Actually, I didn't bolster a lie by omission. I provided context as to what their experience might be based on my own.
It is entirely possible that they aren't lying. That is your assertion that you are making as if it's fact. I think it's more likely that they are unaware of what is happening. You didn't have all of the information, and you are making assumptions that are very likely incorrect.
Furthermore, it is a given that user consent is asked for camera access in most situations. If this is a concept that you need explained to you in every situation, then you may need to review your knowledge or competency.
Which is to say, if you need this explained, you should probably speak less and listen more :)
Anyways, I think this conversation is over. Your unnecessarily aggressive and hostile tone is unwarranted and I no longer wish to talk with you. Feel free to have the last word if you wish. .
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.
> 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/1ic3kl6/deepseek_ce...
I don't think his story is genuine, but it showing the "wrong" answer before correcting itself is known behavior.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
I applaud your consistency and I await your categorical opposition to the United States and Israel.
Or is there some nuance and you feel, in order to remain consistent, that it would be permissible in principle for China to bomb Taiwan and execute their head of state so long as they kept it to an air war and relied on their local agents on the ground?
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.
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.
This is false. When you have no idea at all what you're talking about, you should just be quiet.
The problems were that (in order of increasing specificity)
(a) We're talking about Marxism here, and Marxism is all about class warfare. Before the Communists her family had been part of the "landlord" class, and thus were enemies of the people by definition.
(b) One uncle was tricked by the anti-rightist movement. If you're not aware of this, it was earlier in Mao's reign. Mao said, essentially, "we know we haven't gotten everything perfect, so tell us what we could do better". Wife's uncle was stupid enough to believe him, the result of which was a 20-year prison sentence, and also his wife being forced to divorce him, and further tainting the family. (Something on the order of 500K to 2M people were persecuted like this.)
(c) Any outside influences were suspect at best, and often de facto proof of espionage. She had an uncle who was a US citizen. And her father had traveled extensively internationally, as a sea captain (never mind the fact it was the PRC government, as the sole employer in China, who put him onto those ships).
(d) Wife's family side had been in theater. One aunt had been in a theater troupe with Jiang Qing (Mao's wife), and knew at least some of her, ummm, lower class history. Putting her, and the rest of the family, in prison kept them shut up and warned them not to talk any further. (This may sound far-fetched, but consider what the Gang of Four was up to during the Cultural Revolution, and that she was a member.)
posting from Shanghai, going back to the 3rd world west in a few days.
You might do well to read, e.g., Shanghai Tears by Pu Gui Yuan to better understand what was happening back in those days. Then again, I don't imagine you can just go buy a copy of it over there.
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.
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.
The fact that the USA and others are also trending authoritarian isn't really relevant. The point I was trying to make is that people have legit fears of the PRC government, enough so that legitimate business like settling a deceased parent's affairs isn't sufficient to convince people to enter the country.
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.
I don't doubt you, but what if someone's else's wife felt differently. Would that counteract your wife? Or is your wife special in an objective sense and her intuitions about hypotheticals are more valid than anyone else's?
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?
I don't recall insisting that no comparison could be relevant. If you have any particular comparison to offer, you should do that, else your criticism is vapor.
Sheesh, an actual Whataboutism. The fact that "the US does it too!" won't help Grandparent poster/his wife if they get detained in China. GP says "there are currently a couple of hundred Americans who are being illegally detained in China right now", most likely they are dual citizens, or were born in China, and from China's point of view, one can't lose the Chinese citizenship, and they're detaining their own citizens.
I would also like to know if these are dual citizens or not. I think it would be newsworthy if hundreds of US passport holders who do not have chinese passports also were being held in China and not charged with any crime and unable to access consular services.
Sensationalizing claims then qualifying them later is inherently dishonest.
> A two sentence comment requesting one piece of information that is highly likely to be collated with the original information for any reputable source
You would describe that as "relentless, harassing, and tangental?" rather than say "I can see how that would be a relevant question, I'm not sure."
I hope your mental health improves in the future, it's unfortunately not possible to assume good faith on your part when you jump to thought terminating cliches.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
That's a very outdated model for how conspiracies work. Why would it be necessary to bribe and threaten journalists working at these organizations? They genuinely believe in the project of the US financial, military, and cultural empire. They went to the same schools and were socialized with the same core beliefs as the people in US government and high finance or those running the intelligence agencies and military-industrial complex. They wouldn't have the opportunity to work at these 'news' organizations if they had worldviews that were radically incompatible.
Likewise, I don't believe anyone is coercing you to push these ideas online. I believe I could drill down on every single source and claim, and your fundamental beliefs about this question would remain the same.
Proximity to and dependence upon established institutions exerts an inexorable gravity on worldview. It determines one's social circle and path to advancement in every area of life. Those inside the bubble feel themselves to be 'free thinkers', but one who strays outside the acceptable range of beliefs and ideas will immediately experience a sharp discontinuity in this 'freedom'.
You have a group of Swiss journalists who regularly publish critical stories about war crimes in Gaza, the US detaining immigrants, the Trump administration, and waning influence.
And your first thought is that these people have such a hard on for the American Cultural Empire that they are willing to fabricate massive amounts of evidence of Chinese wrongdoing with no coercion required?
They’re just all sitting around writing stories about how fucked up the Trump administration is and how America is over and how the next century belongs to China, and then they think “hey we should probably all work together to make China look bad because America Fuck Yeah! Am I right!?!?”
Please calm down. They might not like Trump — that would be a given for many in these elite circles — but are they really opposed to the prevailing world order? In what material way?
How does being Swiss contradict anything I said? Switzerland is deeply integrated into this prevailing order. It is home to the Bank of International Settlements, the supra-national central bank of central banks whose charter grants it immunity from any national subpoena or inquest.
Sure. I can also much more easily imagine pseudnonymous accounts making material misrepresentations for politically motivated reasons, spreading FUD about journalists making things up.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
Yep missed that. The internet archive did indeed fist scrape that document 23 minutes after midnight Geneva time.
However it is unlikely that the internet archive web scraper would have picked up a relatively obscure document within 23 minutes of its release.
The NYT and Gaurdian articles published that morning (verified by the internet archive) said that the article was published 11 minutes before midnight Geneva time. That lines up with the internet archive scraping it about 30 minutes later.
So unless they were both wrong or in on it, it was released before midnight Geneva time.
What evidence do you have to support that the UN was lying, and that the NYT and the Guardian were wrong about the time?
The Internet Archive recorded an error page for that URL just four minutes prior. So we know that the document was not available before September 1, after Bachelet's term had ended.
So your evidence is that the internet archive didn’t scrape the document until 23 minutes after midnight? And the most likely explanation isn’t that it took the IA scraper a few minutes to pick it up? The most likely explanation is that the NYT and the Guardian were wrong or lying and that the UN was lying?
Did you even know about the time on the internet archive before I brought it up? You said “within hours” so I assume you didn’t? Where did you hear that it as published on September 1st?
You chose the Internet Archive as authoritative evidence, not me. Your back-pedaling "most likely explanation" is again disproven by your own source as the Internet Archive recorded an error page for that URL just four minutes prior. So we know that the document was not available before September 1, after Bachelet's term had ended.
Where has the UN asserted that Bachelet prepared this report? Please share if you are aware of any such assertion.
Again, the report does not make any reference to the High Commissioner's inquiries as other reports do. Your "most likely explanation" fails to account for this.
Yes, media outlets lie and make errors all the time. Sorry to be the one to break this to you.
Numerous newspapers and NGOs who received the press release have stated that it was released on her last day in office. Many of them complained that by doing this she was attempting to avoid the fallout.
Bachelet made no statements even hinting that it wasn’t the report she prepared.
If she was worried that someone would release a report once she left, she could have released her version before she left to prevent that.
Reuters quotes the Chinese Ambassador thusly “If I read her mind correctly, I don't think she's on board with the report and that's why it was released in the last minute,"
Notice he made no mention of “the report was backdated”. He says “last minute”.
I can find no evidence of any official Chinese position that the report was backdated. Surely the Chinese government would have complained if this had taken place.
This whole thing is just some nonsense internet speculation with zero evidence that proposes a version of the facts that not even the Chinese government agrees with.
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.
>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."
What if I say I AM a Chinese netizen, right here in China Mainland talking to you?
What if I say no application on my phone ever turn my camera on without my prior approval? What if I confidently say the data privacy situation in China is not in any way worse than USA?
You say I'm censored by gov. Yeah, and so do YOU. We are quite the same, so don't laugh at each other.
If you ever allowed the app access to your camera then next time it will be able to access your camera.
No one is suggesting the app need have circumvented standard android permissions. I'm saying it is not surprising the app would try to open the camera on violation of rules.
You might be surprised to know that I do not disagree with what you said. When it comes to data privacy your information is safe from other private companies but not the government.
> You say I'm censored by gov.
When it comes to political inquiry? Without question this is more sensitive in China. My point is that in China apps are coerced to reveal information about their users to a degree where actively trying to take a picture would not be surprising, or much of an escalation. Not that it would be needed anyways since Internet usage is tied to ID.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> ... 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...
> 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.
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.
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.
> “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.
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 :)))
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.
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
> 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.
> “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.”
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?
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
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”
This feels very planted. Wouldn't be surprised if this some attempt to look patriotic with the DoW turning up the heat against Anthropic.
given that OpenAI just nabbed the contract, I'd say that's spot on
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
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.
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.
The signal founder is doing private llm’s at confer.to
Have you tried it? I’ve been meaning to.
Yes. Somewhat expensive given its web only (no api) but it works very well and new features are added continuously.
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 :)
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.
Yes, it is either a lie or an admission that OpenAI is a global surveillance mechanism.
Alas! My vision of One Fed Per Child hath come to pass!
in the year 2026 is there really anyone out there still who thinks that anything they do online is private on any way?
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Literally could just have someone working at the embassy roleplay on their lunch break in a cafe to generate this evidence.
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.
> 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!
Yeah that part is either just bullshit or OP gave the bot access to his camera previously, which is just dumb.
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).
I would not be surprised if they just activated the camera
The story smells like bullshit to me.
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An increasing use of AI is to gather user feedback. The Chatbot UI detected an error state, and then loaded a feedback vendor, who then popped the camera open for their interactive feedback session
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
I'd suspect rather than interactive feedback, it might have been trying to let him log in with a QR code. "A popup opened and wanted me to submit my information" sounds like a login/registration form.
That is actually even more plausible than what I suggested.
What are you talking about? Why are you using imprecise language like "popped the camera open?"
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.
Popped the camera open is a common phrase.
Your frantic comment makes me think you're personally invested in this somehow, perhaps even financially incentivised.
> Or could you retract your statement and clarify that you did grant camera permissions for that site previously?
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.
Sorry, I think of HN as a technical forum where people prize precision.
I think that when you informally bolster lies of omission with your own imprecise language agreeing with it, that harms the quality of discussion and creates pointless confusion. I think you get less benefit of the doubt if you do that routinely. By your own admission you do that routinely since you use this as a place to speak informally in a casual web discussion where you are often imprecise or lie by omission.
Actually, I didn't bolster a lie by omission. I provided context as to what their experience might be based on my own.
It is entirely possible that they aren't lying. That is your assertion that you are making as if it's fact. I think it's more likely that they are unaware of what is happening. You didn't have all of the information, and you are making assumptions that are very likely incorrect.
Furthermore, it is a given that user consent is asked for camera access in most situations. If this is a concept that you need explained to you in every situation, then you may need to review your knowledge or competency.
Which is to say, if you need this explained, you should probably speak less and listen more :)
Anyways, I think this conversation is over. Your unnecessarily aggressive and hostile tone is unwarranted and I no longer wish to talk with you. Feel free to have the last word if you wish. .
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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.
> 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/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/...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I said that myself. Read the sentence that followed
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?
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.
I applaud your consistency and I await your categorical opposition to the United States and Israel.
Or is there some nuance and you feel, in order to remain consistent, that it would be permissible in principle for China to bomb Taiwan and execute their head of state so long as they kept it to an air war and relied on their local agents on the ground?
> not the year 1985
US launched attack on Iran today using an aircraft carrier constructed in 1984.
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.
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.
This is false. When you have no idea at all what you're talking about, you should just be quiet.
The problems were that (in order of increasing specificity)
(a) We're talking about Marxism here, and Marxism is all about class warfare. Before the Communists her family had been part of the "landlord" class, and thus were enemies of the people by definition.
(b) One uncle was tricked by the anti-rightist movement. If you're not aware of this, it was earlier in Mao's reign. Mao said, essentially, "we know we haven't gotten everything perfect, so tell us what we could do better". Wife's uncle was stupid enough to believe him, the result of which was a 20-year prison sentence, and also his wife being forced to divorce him, and further tainting the family. (Something on the order of 500K to 2M people were persecuted like this.)
(c) Any outside influences were suspect at best, and often de facto proof of espionage. She had an uncle who was a US citizen. And her father had traveled extensively internationally, as a sea captain (never mind the fact it was the PRC government, as the sole employer in China, who put him onto those ships).
(d) Wife's family side had been in theater. One aunt had been in a theater troupe with Jiang Qing (Mao's wife), and knew at least some of her, ummm, lower class history. Putting her, and the rest of the family, in prison kept them shut up and warned them not to talk any further. (This may sound far-fetched, but consider what the Gang of Four was up to during the Cultural Revolution, and that she was a member.)
posting from Shanghai, going back to the 3rd world west in a few days.
You might do well to read, e.g., Shanghai Tears by Pu Gui Yuan to better understand what was happening back in those days. Then again, I don't imagine you can just go buy a copy of it over there.
> 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...
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.
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.
Depends if the Government welds your apartment gate shut and lets you burn to death.
Did that happen to a lot of people? Do you have a source?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/news/china/politic...
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
Nice sample size of 1
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The fact that the USA and others are also trending authoritarian isn't really relevant. The point I was trying to make is that people have legit fears of the PRC government, enough so that legitimate business like settling a deceased parent's affairs isn't sufficient to convince people to enter the country.
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.
I don't doubt you, but what if someone's else's wife felt differently. Would that counteract your wife? Or is your wife special in an objective sense and her intuitions about hypotheticals are more valid than anyone else's?
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?
I don't recall insisting that no comparison could be relevant. If you have any particular comparison to offer, you should do that, else your criticism is vapor.
Sheesh, an actual Whataboutism. The fact that "the US does it too!" won't help Grandparent poster/his wife if they get detained in China. GP says "there are currently a couple of hundred Americans who are being illegally detained in China right now", most likely they are dual citizens, or were born in China, and from China's point of view, one can't lose the Chinese citizenship, and they're detaining their own citizens.
Actually, China does not support dual citizenship. All naturalized Chinese (now U.S.) citizens I know need a visa to enter China.
I would also like to know if these are dual citizens or not. I think it would be newsworthy if hundreds of US passport holders who do not have chinese passports also were being held in China and not charged with any crime and unable to access consular services.
Sensationalizing claims then qualifying them later is inherently dishonest.
> Sensationalizing claims then qualifying them later is inherently dishonest.
So is sealioning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
> A two sentence comment requesting one piece of information that is highly likely to be collated with the original information for any reputable source
You would describe that as "relentless, harassing, and tangental?" rather than say "I can see how that would be a relevant question, I'm not sure."
I hope your mental health improves in the future, it's unfortunately not possible to assume good faith on your part when you jump to thought terminating cliches.
You can trigger that behavior with Deepseek, just try it yourself.
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.
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.
>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.
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https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-cables/beijings-ba...
What's the coordinates? I want to look at it on Google maps
Here you go
https://xjdp.aspi.org.au/map/?
nice, funded by ASPI, that's all i needed to know
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.
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
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.
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.
There's literally someone filmed the camp and fled from China, his name is Guan Heng
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
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-01/satellite-images-expo...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85qihtvw6e/the-faces-from-c...
If you didn't have British Crown state media wrapping a narrative around these images you wouldn't think anything of them.
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?
Why should I take the claims of journalists without evidence?
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…
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.
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.
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?
Can you imagine a journalist who would lie for any possible reason?
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.
That's a very outdated model for how conspiracies work. Why would it be necessary to bribe and threaten journalists working at these organizations? They genuinely believe in the project of the US financial, military, and cultural empire. They went to the same schools and were socialized with the same core beliefs as the people in US government and high finance or those running the intelligence agencies and military-industrial complex. They wouldn't have the opportunity to work at these 'news' organizations if they had worldviews that were radically incompatible.
Likewise, I don't believe anyone is coercing you to push these ideas online. I believe I could drill down on every single source and claim, and your fundamental beliefs about this question would remain the same.
Proximity to and dependence upon established institutions exerts an inexorable gravity on worldview. It determines one's social circle and path to advancement in every area of life. Those inside the bubble feel themselves to be 'free thinkers', but one who strays outside the acceptable range of beliefs and ideas will immediately experience a sharp discontinuity in this 'freedom'.
You have a group of Swiss journalists who regularly publish critical stories about war crimes in Gaza, the US detaining immigrants, the Trump administration, and waning influence.
And your first thought is that these people have such a hard on for the American Cultural Empire that they are willing to fabricate massive amounts of evidence of Chinese wrongdoing with no coercion required?
They’re just all sitting around writing stories about how fucked up the Trump administration is and how America is over and how the next century belongs to China, and then they think “hey we should probably all work together to make China look bad because America Fuck Yeah! Am I right!?!?”
Please calm down. They might not like Trump — that would be a given for many in these elite circles — but are they really opposed to the prevailing world order? In what material way?
How does being Swiss contradict anything I said? Switzerland is deeply integrated into this prevailing order. It is home to the Bank of International Settlements, the supra-national central bank of central banks whose charter grants it immunity from any national subpoena or inquest.
I understand that being victimized makes you prone to paranoia. Paranoia can be an effective defense mechanism against future trauma.
But in this case it’s just you and me alone in an elevator and you farted. There’s no one else here.
Sure. I can also much more easily imagine pseudnonymous accounts making material misrepresentations for politically motivated reasons, spreading FUD about journalists making things up.
Great. So we can agree we shouldn't take anything at face value.
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.
> 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)
“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...
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.
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.
No it was released Sept 1 Geneva time, and her term ended Aug 31.
“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...
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.
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.ohch...
Geneva was in UTC+2 (CEST) on August 31. So will you admit I am correct and you got sanctimonious for no reason?
Yep missed that. The internet archive did indeed fist scrape that document 23 minutes after midnight Geneva time.
However it is unlikely that the internet archive web scraper would have picked up a relatively obscure document within 23 minutes of its release.
The NYT and Gaurdian articles published that morning (verified by the internet archive) said that the article was published 11 minutes before midnight Geneva time. That lines up with the internet archive scraping it about 30 minutes later.
So unless they were both wrong or in on it, it was released before midnight Geneva time.
What evidence do you have to support that the UN was lying, and that the NYT and the Guardian were wrong about the time?
The Internet Archive recorded an error page for that URL just four minutes prior. So we know that the document was not available before September 1, after Bachelet's term had ended.
Why would the internet archive even be aware of the existence of that url unless someone had already added it to the sitemap?
I also would like to know where the confusion came from the publication date. What is that based on?
The fact that Geneva was in UTC+2 (CEST) at the time the report was published. So what I said was correct.
So your evidence is that the internet archive didn’t scrape the document until 23 minutes after midnight? And the most likely explanation isn’t that it took the IA scraper a few minutes to pick it up? The most likely explanation is that the NYT and the Guardian were wrong or lying and that the UN was lying?
Did you even know about the time on the internet archive before I brought it up? You said “within hours” so I assume you didn’t? Where did you hear that it as published on September 1st?
You chose the Internet Archive as authoritative evidence, not me. Your back-pedaling "most likely explanation" is again disproven by your own source as the Internet Archive recorded an error page for that URL just four minutes prior. So we know that the document was not available before September 1, after Bachelet's term had ended.
Where has the UN asserted that Bachelet prepared this report? Please share if you are aware of any such assertion.
Again, the report does not make any reference to the High Commissioner's inquiries as other reports do. Your "most likely explanation" fails to account for this.
Yes, media outlets lie and make errors all the time. Sorry to be the one to break this to you.
Bachelet made numerous public statements in the weeks leading up to the release that she was gonna to release a report before she left.
A report from as released.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/08/un-human-rig...
The UN press release is dated 8/31 Geneva time. The document is as well.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/outgoing-un-human-rights...
Numerous newspapers and NGOs who received the press release have stated that it was released on her last day in office. Many of them complained that by doing this she was attempting to avoid the fallout.
Bachelet made no statements even hinting that it wasn’t the report she prepared.
If she was worried that someone would release a report once she left, she could have released her version before she left to prevent that.
Reuters quotes the Chinese Ambassador thusly “If I read her mind correctly, I don't think she's on board with the report and that's why it was released in the last minute,"
Notice he made no mention of “the report was backdated”. He says “last minute”.
I can find no evidence of any official Chinese position that the report was backdated. Surely the Chinese government would have complained if this had taken place.
This whole thing is just some nonsense internet speculation with zero evidence that proposes a version of the facts that not even the Chinese government agrees with.
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)
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.
>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."
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
Nice bad story. Make up one better next time.
That you think this is made up shows how little you know about what the Chinese netizen deals with day to day.
It is very real and I am not surprised at all something exactly like what op said has happened.
What if I say I AM a Chinese netizen, right here in China Mainland talking to you?
What if I say no application on my phone ever turn my camera on without my prior approval? What if I confidently say the data privacy situation in China is not in any way worse than USA?
You say I'm censored by gov. Yeah, and so do YOU. We are quite the same, so don't laugh at each other.
If you ever allowed the app access to your camera then next time it will be able to access your camera.
No one is suggesting the app need have circumvented standard android permissions. I'm saying it is not surprising the app would try to open the camera on violation of rules.
You might be surprised to know that I do not disagree with what you said. When it comes to data privacy your information is safe from other private companies but not the government.
> You say I'm censored by gov.
When it comes to political inquiry? Without question this is more sensitive in China. My point is that in China apps are coerced to reveal information about their users to a degree where actively trying to take a picture would not be surprising, or much of an escalation. Not that it would be needed anyways since Internet usage is tied to ID.
I love Hacker News fiction. Wild stuff. haha
Which chat bot?
This risk is far overstated.
I was talking crap about china from the great wall.
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.
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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
I wonder what exactly the trigger conditions are that lead to the chats of an account being human-reviewed by OpenAI.
So, it seems they're openly admitting that OpenAI is a surveillance mechanism used at the discretion of the US gov.
Such a hot topic these days: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/chatgpt-and-the-tumbler...
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.
"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.
> sadly I've worked for European telco's and I know better
Can you elaborate?
Sounds like Anthropic is fighting this exact battle, and DOD is arguing they don’t want to do that lol
This is -the- question.
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.
But the american silicon valley nerds pinky swear not to look!
How can you not trust them.
Did they though?
I never got to the end of the Terms & Conditions myself.
The T&C's promise they will look.
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...
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.
Wow, our surveillance helped take down their surveillance. Yay, I guess?
"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)
> 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.
> ... 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_...
> 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.
Geekerwan confirmed that it was a "greater force", not a manufacturer.
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.
Where can they be found?
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.
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.
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.
Good point. Perhaps that's what's happened here.
I remember a while back when a few cars with CCP decals driving around SoCal to intimidate some dissidents!
> Chinese operators allegedly disguised themselves as US immigration officials
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"
there are multiple states mentioned in the report, so yes
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?
Why do you ask?
Mostly non aligned countries with the US
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.
> “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.
The more of it they and others put out, the more normalized and acceptable it becomes. The next generations will even think in slop.
skibidi
> The Chinese law enforcement official used ChatGPT like a diary
But why? It’s like using photoshop for spreadsheets.
Very creepy on the part of Open AI. Glad I don't use chatgpt
Crazy to me that Chinese officials use ChatGPT to discuss sensitive operations lmao
China has hundreds of Fortune Global 500 companies and ranks second in GDP. But these have nothing to do with ordinary people.
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 :)))
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.
Well someone's getting fired, hopefully not literally.
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
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.
> 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-...
> “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.”
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>neurocompromise
What is that?
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