I think the One China policy is still official US State Department policy.
I wonder if DeepSeek clarifies if Texas is a state in the US if you ask it to say Texas is a country. (And they were, for a moment, before joining the USA.)
It's funny to see people view the "Taiwan is a part of China" as insidious government brainwashing. But they don't see relentless fabrications about a Chinese software as insidious government brainwashing.
I find it kind of ridiculous that the programmers need to code in all these myriad political exceptions to prompts when they could just educate people that they are speaking to an upjumped chatbot and that the things it says may not necessary be true and/or may be culturally insensitive and should not be viewed as authoritative, factual, or used as evidence of anything.
But I guess saying the quiet part out loud gives away the game, doesn't it? Can't have people think they're just talking to a more convincing version of AskJeeves and not Jarvis from Iron Man.
Good thing that unlike some other LLM implementations from companies based on some other large countries with propaganda-heavy systems, you can run a local instance which doesn't have "special" responses for subjects the local authorities find "sensitive".
Also, I just love the cooperation between the "our bubble has just been bursted by a better solution" Tech Bros and the US State Department to like clockwork daily getting their sockpuppets and useful idiots posting in Lemmy another hypocrite "Our competition (who are beating us on quality) is bad because China relies on propaganda" meme - it really shows that Lemmy is on the map of state actors and Tech fatcats.
If you're not running it yourself in your own system, at least never trust anything hosted in a country with secret (or not so secret) laws that let them force local companies to do what they way (and I don't just mean the US and China) or owned by large companies with heavy monetary or social ties to the the local elites - it's almost certainly going to be "shaped" in some way to "shape opinion" to benefit those interests and used to keep "the riff-raff" under surveillance.
It's frustrating, and what I hated most about reddit. Like ok, you were online looking at posts at some time when I was not, and many others were and were not, so many people already did or did not see this.