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0 pointslibertine1mo ago0 comments

As far as I'm aware there's no media government control in democratic western countries (yet).

The LLMs aren't trained on "official news", if there's such a thing in Western countries - at best government press releases, is that what you mean by "official news"?

So I don't see how that's censoring/manipulation of an LLM.

Like for example, Wikipedia is a Western construction and would never exist in China, or Russia, without government supervision (rendering it useless).

When you say "rich capitalists and warmongers control the narrative", where does that happen? I mean practically.

It's like your conception of western media is similar to China and Russia, where censorship, control and filters are applied.

> They manipulate the training data instead of censoring the model, but the result is the same.

Do you have any proof of this?

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jocro1mo ago

> When you say "rich capitalists and warmongers control the narrative", where does that happen? I mean practically.

i don't agree with the hyperbolic nature of the op here but if you're sincerely interested in the question this is what chomsky and herman (imo quite persuasively) argue in Manufacturing Consent. attaching a profit motive to the distribution of new information, particularly in an economy that tends towards centralization of, necessarily biases what news is printed.

it's certainly not as visually dramatic or directly controlled an effect as the prc's top-down model, but markets are effective.

libertineOP1mo ago

But that's just conflicting a lot of things that I don't think it's western manipulation and censorship of LLMs:

- manufacturing consent isn't a silver bullet, and it's much harder now with the internet - how did it work for the current events? Gaza war, Venezuela, Canada, Greenland, Iran war? Not saying the administration didn't try, but again, it isn't a silver bullet and doesn't seem to have an impact on the vast majority of LLMs - maybe Grok is the exception because it was done with that intent.

- information isn't centralized in western countries, though in the case of Trump he tries to centralize attention, successfully. But that doesn't seem to bend how events are portrait in reality and in LLMs.

The thing is, a lot of people that got fed into anti western narrative use magical thinking to believe countries from USA, Europe, Japan, Australia are all organized - orchestrated by the US.

This is insanity ofc, like, trade deals between these countries take years to be organized, but somehow everything is a conspiracy to be in the same informational tune?

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