my personal view is not relevant here, that is the exact reason why I didn't even mention it in my initial reply. I was just pointing out an obvious trend in LLM here.
My point was that censorship is not the right way to describe what's going on.
We all have different ways to behave in different social environments. That applies to many things including language (for example swearing).
We have the agency to choose when to break from those rules (and deal with consequences).
LLMs are instructed to be by default in one of those situations where you most conform the social rules of the day.
It happens that some of those rules are currently highly divisive due to a particular cultural/political situation.
Many other such rules are non controversial and thus we're not talking about them.
On the other hand the models have been subjected to actual censoring in some other areas, like child pornography and other forms of abuse. These happen to be actually illegal in all western countries.
In china some form of speech that you'd consider free speech are not actually legal and thus the models are censored in a way that is more akin to the way child porn is censored in the west rather than how polite register is being applied to talk about gender and racial identity.
