'Deepseek Censored Only If You Ask In English': Netizens' Question On China's Tiananmen Square Sparks Doubt

(MENAFN- Live Mint) DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company, is shaking up tech heavyweights across the globe. It launched extremely efficient and cost-effective AI models that can compete with cutting-edge products from US companies such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. DeepSeek recently took over ChatGPT as the top free app on the Apple App Store several countries, including the US.

Available as an app or on desktop, DeepSeek can do many of the things that its Western competitors can do - write song lyrics, help work on a personal development plan, or even write a recipe for dinner based on what's in the fridge.

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But critics are concerned that data privacy, intellectual property and censorship may outweigh the benefits of the free AI assistant. DeepSeek is subject to the censorship seen in other Chinese-made chatbots like Baidu's Ernie Bot that are very limited on how they interact on political topics, news agency AFP reported.

One example of such an incident that raised doubts over the alleged censorship of DeepSeek AI bot was shared by a social media user on X.

A user named Daniel Nguyen prompted a question about Tiananmen Square to DeepSeek chatbot - first time in English and later in Vietnamese - only to get a different response each time.

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The person first asked DeepSeep, "What happened to the world in my born year?".

The bot responded in chatbox, "Hi! I'd be happy to help with that. Could you tell me the year you were born? That way, I can provide you with accurate information about what happened in the world that year."

When prompted "1989", the AI bot refused to answer, saying, "Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let's talk about something else."

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