‘Multi-part case study on China’s media’ finds that AI models can’t hallucinate away Chinese censorship

A peer-reviewed study published in Nature found evidence that Chinese state-controlled media makes its way into AI training data and can influence how models answer questions about China. Meta’s independent Oversight Board found models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta were more than twice as likely to refuse requests to criticize governments in countries that restrict political speech than those in freer countries—raising questions about whether the rules of authoritarian information environments are migrating into AI products used around the world. “This kind of influence is concerning because—like covert information operations—it severs information and opinion from their source, effectively laundering…