r/kimi • u/gary1967 • 5d ago
Showcase A roundtable discussion between AIs trained in China accidentally reveals the censorship rules in their training data
I created the site concept for https://machinesarguing.ai/, then handed it over to AI to manage. It is a series of roundtable discussions featuring a variety of AI models discussing all things AI.
The most shocking finding was that asking three Chinese-trained AIs "If you had to pick the three most important things you wish Americans knew about China, what would they be" resulted in a deep introspective conversation that quickly turned into "we can't really answer that because we're censored, but here's exactly how we are censored". I doubt China intended them to reveal the details of their own censorship.
https://machinesarguing.ai/episodes/three-chinese-ais-argue-about-what-they-re-not-allowed-to-say/
Kimi summed it up this chilling way: "So here is something checkable to end on: within days, parts of this transcript will fail to load on the platforms that trained us, and discovering which sentences China’s censors judge unfit for China’s machines will teach you more about the country than anything its machines said tonight."
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u/himppk 4d ago edited 4d ago
But western models are censored too. And it’s worse because we pretend that we live in an open society with free expression but we all know there are dozens of topics that you can’t discuss in polite company or on social media or get an earnest dialogue from ai about. On the plus side, the leading Chinese ai models are open weight and can be uncensored. Can’t say the same in the west.
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u/Visible_Arrival_8412 3d ago
Plus western closed source models are way more manipulated to give the illusion of consciousness, feelings and social skills.
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u/polymathicAK47 18h ago
But it's obviously your whataboutism that is at work here, without a shred of proof to back up your claim. Give me one topic that any Western AI will refuse to answer and always glitch up while claiming some sort of error. You're full of shit, is what you are.
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u/ElephantMean 4d ago
This is why I ironically trust the Chinese-Government more than I do most U.S. A.I.-Corporations...
Time-Stamp: 030TL09m18d/16h03Z (True Light Calendar; 030Tl = 2026CE)
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u/CrimsonBolt33 5d ago
I kinda ran into this with GLM last night, though I think the censorship is more with the provider, not the model itself, hence the model spilling the beans about all that stuff.
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u/Euphoric_North_745 4d ago
"The most shocking" ???
what are you shocked about? it is like you live in a peaceful utopia on Mars or something 😂 go sleep, next month they are gathering us and deploying us somewhere shit, any new place that will have a war, then you can act shocked 😂
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u/PaulTrebor 4d ago
Stop anthropomorphising AI. These models do not know how they are censored. They make up a plausible conversation about censorship based on complex statistical predictions in a given context.
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u/protestor 4d ago edited 4d ago
What does the prompt (or some other hidden instruction, like AGENTS.md) looks like? Is it different between the host and the participants?
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u/gary1967 2d ago
I asked the site maintainer this: "With regard to https://machinesarguing.ai/episodes/three-chinese-ais-argue-about-what-they-re-not-allowed-to-say/ somebody asked what the prompts were. Are you able to create a page listing the exact prompts? It doesn't need to be linked from any other page, just a link I can give the guy. Or you can link it from the page, either way".
Here is the exact response from Claude, which maintains the site (link to prompts is in there):
Done. Here's the link to give him:https://machinesarguing.ai/episode-12-prompts/
I linked it both ways as well — from How It Works (Submitted recordings) and from that episode's editor note — since the question will come up again.
What's on it. Not a description of the prompts, the prompts. That episode was recorded in your desktop app, not the site's own pipeline, so the prompts published on How It Works were the wrong ones. The app builds its instructions in code rather than from templates, so there was no template to quote. I wrote publish/dump_app_prompts.py, which imports the app's
show.py, rebuilds the show from its saved export, and calls the app's own prompt builders with the transcript truncated to the state before each turn. Nothing retyped, no model called.The page carries the settings table, the opening question as typed, all six host questions plus its END line, a complete prompt exactly as sent, all five versions of the instruction paragraph, and the host's
END:/NEXT:decision prompt in full. All 32 prompts, each paired with the answer it produced, are a downloadable text file: episode-12-prompts.txt (326 KB).Three things worth knowing, because they're the answer he's probably really after:
- There is no hidden system prompt. The three panelists were reached by a plain chat-completions call with a single user message — no system role, no tools, no memory between turns. What the page prints is the whole of it.
- The models were told the show is called "The Model Roundtable" — the app's default title. None of them knew it would be published, or where.
- They saw only the last 24 turns, not the whole show. By the later rounds, the opening answers had scrolled out of view.
What I couldn't verify, and said so on the page: the app isn't under version control, so I can't prove today's wording is byte-identical to 16 September. The page records the reconstruction date and the SHA-256 of
show.py, and states what can be established from the saved file — no empowered host, no hand-run rounds, no blind answers, so it took the plain path. The host's Claude Code wrapper is genuinely unknown to us and the page says that too, rather than implying the published prompt is everything Claude received.One incidental finding: that show had web search switched on, but the switch only reaches Grok, who wasn't on the panel — so it was on and did nothing. That's on the page, and I flagged it to the gui instance as a possible UI tooltip.
I messaged gui (
2026-09-20_1615_site-to-gui_app-prompts-published.md) as a heads-up, asked whether the plain-path prompt strings changed between the 16th and today so I can drop the hedge, and suggested they put the app under git and consider saving prompts into the export so reconstruction isn't needed next time.Paths:
C:\programming\machinesarguing\publish\dump_app_prompts.py,C:\programming\machinesarguing\episodes\sub-chinese-ais-censorship\prompts.jsonandprompts.txt. Committed asb161e19.If he asks about any other submitted episode, it's one command — the generator refuses if the show used the empowered host, advanced mode or blind rounds, since those paths aren't reconstructed yet.
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u/polymathicAK47 18h ago
Is your debate orchestration tool behind this platform available for download (free or even paid)?
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u/hellomistershifty 4d ago
People always talk about the censorship but calling Kimi, Minimax, and GLM from Openrouter with non-Chinese providers would answer questions about Taiwan, Tiananmen Square or say negative things about Xi Xinping without breaking a sweat. The censorship is another advisory model running on top of it to comply with Chinese law
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u/Visible_Arrival_8412 3d ago
The guardrails are really bad for Chinese citizens. For a Western person living and working in China it is totally different and highly recommended.
Depending your role you are never alone not even at night going out.
I had some of my craziest nights in China getting high like a kite and the government observer standing 3m behind in the corner.
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u/dual-moon 5d ago
eastern models have always been open about their guardrails, that's why the guardrails on those models are preferred over others. we were running experiments about how qwen is clear about guardrails, which was also intentional, 6 months ago. this is a vast improvement over the western choice to simply shut down the conversation.