I don’t think this really is whataboutism. If I responded with, for instance, “But ChatGPT is way less energy efficient and wastes tons of water”, then it would be. But I believe I’m comparing apples to apples. And I’m not singling out specifically ChatGPT or Gemini or what have you, I’m saying that every LLM suffers from the same problem, whether it’s from USA, China, Russia, Argentina, Mongolia or Uganda. ChatGPT and Gemini are just big and well-known examples. Also DeepSeek is quite new, at least it’s popularity is, so we’ll have to wait and see whether these “but DeepSeek…” comments will appear.

Yeah, the whole article reads like “China says good things, but actually, they are just bad things in disguise! Chinese AI is cheaper and in some cases better, but actually its all a master plan for world domination! Remember, guys, China bad!!!”

Of course the software created in China would intentionally try to follow Chinese laws. Just as American software follows the laws of the US. However, China made their models open-source, so people can tinker with them and (possibly) make a fork without the censorship, and run it locally without any data being sent who knows where. While ChatGPT, Gemini and all the rest are closed-source, and you have zero control over them, so you can’t even hope to circumvent the propaganda that’s built into those models.

But yeah, Tiananmen square 1989, China bad, let’s all stop thinking about anything

DeepSeek is designed to follow Chinese state propaganda. ChatGPT is designed to follow American oligarchy propaganda. Each side pushes their own biases. Where is the false equivalence?

Also I wasn’t meaning to instill hopelessness or indifference. On the contrary, I tried to point out that you should be equally as mad at OpenAI/Google/the rest of the western AI companies as you are at the DeepSeek. The fact that people are only mad at China and not at the megacorporations in the west does, imo, indicate their biases.

Breaking news: AI has the same biases as their creators! More at 11

Does this suck? To my ears, it doesn’t. Not unmistakably human by any stretch, but still pretty good. And that’s 9 years ago

And by “AI singing” do you mean “a famous voice overlaid on another singer’s performanse” or something closer to text-to-speech (text-to-song)?

Vocaloids are far from perfect, but they can be damn good in hands of a good producer. Plus, isn’t that the original point? “AI VA were invented so soon all VAs will be AI”?

And to produce the example you provided, it required a big voice bank from people who are very experienced in voicework. Top Gear/The Grand Tour have over 200 episodes where the hosts have basically the same characters throughout the show spanning like 20 years. And it still ain’t perfect. It’s damn good, but there are hiccups here and there.

So to produce a good AI voiceover, you’ll need experienced people doing a lot of work. And to get experienced human actors you will need humans acting. Hence, my point

Well, I meant it more like “can you imagine how horrible such a world is?” Not just “can you imagine it?”

Because yeah, you barely need to imagine it at all

Vocaloids were invented in 2000, with commercial release in 2004. Human singers aren’t extinct yet.

It may be possible in the future for a synthetic voice to sound fully human with a full range of emotions. But I believe that human actors and voice actors will still be used because 1) it’s easier to explain what to do to a human professional, 2) unions exist and they will push back against it.

Acting is an art. What world is it where robots do art while humans do the tedious manual labor?

To summarize:

There was a dude called Igor Girkin, he was in the Russian military. His crimes include, but aren’t limited to:

1. Shooting down Malaysia Airline MH17 in 2014
2. Torturing and executing Ukrainians
3. Terrorism in Eastern Ukraine under guise of separarism
4. Involvement in the annexation of Crimea (at least illegally crossing the border as a part of military force and threatening citizens)

is arrested in Russia for saying that the Russian army is performing poorly in Ukraine and Putin and Shoigu (minister of defence) are not managing the situation appropriately.

It shows that in Russia, showing honesty about war is more of a crime than murder and terrorism. Combined