Weird. I wonder if there are regional differences. It just provided a succinct answer to "who appoints the head of nasa? is the appointment confirmed in congress or not?"

NASA worked for me, FBI director got me an “I can’t help with that right now”.

It makes sense that Google is much more careful than Claude or ChatGPT about things like political topics, they just have so much more to lose from drawing the ire of politicians. Conservatives already hate them so much that they want to break up the company. Imagine if Gemini starts saying negative stuff about them.

Very plausible, but as a user, I don't care at all about the why. I'll just use somebody else's model.

Yeah that's somewhat of a special case - the Gemini API even has a specific CIVIC_INTEGRITY flag in its safety filters: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/safety-settings. They literally put "election-related queries" on the same table column as "sexual acts" or "hate speech".

It's not exactly explained how answering who the current president is would be considered harmful to civic integrity, but it is something very specifically filtered out and not really the result of the general RLHF lobotomy.

Very interesting, thank you! There's no way to control any of that on gemini.google.com though, is there?

Again, my favorite part is seeing the original result flash for a second, to be then replaced by a refusal (which is sometimes even a lie). Based on your link, I guess this happens because the filter reads and post-processes the output, which is streamed to the client?

I couldn't come up with a more dystopian product experience if I tried.