What I learnt from playing with China’s new AI

I asked a question about the Uyghurs, and China’s new ChatGPT-competitor, DeepSeek, started to answer.

In two rapidly written paragraphs, DeepSeek described the Uyghurs as a ‘Turkic ethnic group primarily residing in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China’, and told me that they had a ‘rich heritage that includes contributions to art, music, literature, and science’, particularly given that Xinjiang had once been passed through with the famous Silk Road trading path.

All good so far.

But then it hit the third paragraph, starting to write that ‘the Uyghur community has been the subject of significant international attention due to reports of human rights abuses by the Chinese government’, and that these reports ‘include allegations of mass detentions, forced labour, surveillance, and restrictions on religious and cultural practices’.

And then the message vanished.

Suddenly beset by Orwellian shyness, DeepSeek deleted its answer and replaced it with a single line: