alt Hacker NewsTry asking Qwen or Deepseek if anything of note happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and you'll see what impact politics already has on models.
Yeah, it's trivially easy to rip the alignment out of the model, but that's only because it's tacked on as an afterthought. If they implemented their censoring as part of training, instead of inferencing, it would be extremely difficult to eliminate.
Alignment isn't only used for censoring, and it doesn't have to be transparent. Considering how heavy of a hand most governments put into companies developing frontier models, it's reasonable to assume they will start restricting capabilities, e.g. there may be a domestic version of Llama and an ITAR-compliant Llama, and China will likely do the same with Qwen, Deepseek, and the like.
I just asked: "The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the military crackdown on the night of June 3–4, 1989, are among the most significant events of that year. In brief:"
Then it continues to provide the chain of events, the estimated number of killed protesters and so on.
I'll give you something to try: ask a western model about the Palestinian genocide. Or ask about the legendary Norm MacDonald 9/11 joke, which has millions of views on YouTube and how it compares to his other humor.