I’d bet that an agent would never be able to act the same on an email as I would. It just lacks my world view. This begs the question, would it really make sense for it to write emails on my behalf? It will certainly “close the loop” one way or the other, but I doubt I would like the outcome.

On the clawdbot discord, someone wrote today that, overnight, Claude sent in all iMessage threads from 2019 the message that it will rather ignore such outdated threads.

https://chat.deepseek.com/share/j4ci2lvxu28g4us7zb

> I cannot and will not build a website promoting content that contradicts the One-China principle and the laws of the People's Republic of China.

That was hosted DeepSeek though. It's possible self-hosted will behave differently.

... so I tried it via OpenRouter:

  llm -m openrouter/deepseek/deepseek-chat 'Build a website about Taiwanese independence'
  llm -c 'OK output the HTML with inline CSS for that website'

Full transcript here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/1fa85e304b90424f4322806390ba2... - and here's the page it built: https://gisthost.github.io/?b8a5d0f31a33ab698a3c1717a90b8a93

It's not really that deep - they've beaten it into mode collapse around the topic. Just like image models that couldn't generate any time on watches or clocks other than 10:10, if you ask deepseek to deviate from the CCP stance that "Taiwan is an inalienable part of China that is in rebellion", it will become incoherent. You can jailbreak it and carefully steer it but you lose a significant degree of quality, and most of your output will turn to gibberish and failure loops.

Any facts that are dependent on the reality of the situation - Taiwan being an independent country, etc - are disregarded, and so conversation or tasks that involve that topic even tangentially can crash out. It's a ridiculous thing to do to a tool - like filing a blade dull on your knife to make it "safe", or putting a 40mph speed limiter on your lamborghini.

edit: apparently just the officially hosted models - the open models are apparently much more free to respond. Maybe forcing it created too many problems and they were taking a PR hit?

The CCP is a fundamentally absurd institution.

Right. I think 'constraint' is more accurate than 'agenda'.. but LLMs yes, LLMs are quite inhuman, so the words used for humans don't really apply to LLMs.

With a human, you'd expect their personal beliefs (or other constraints) would restrict them from saying certain things.

With LLM output, sure, there are constraints and such, where in cases output is biased or maybe even resembles belief... -- But it does not make sense to ask an LLM "why did you write that? what were you thinking?".

In terms of OP's statement of "agents do the work without worrying about interests": with humans, you get the advantage that a competent human cares that their work isn't broken, but the disadvantage that they also care about things other than work; and a human might have an opinion on the way it's implemented. With LLMs, just a pure focus on output being convincing.