Feb 03, 2025 20:00:00

When you ask Google's AI 'Gemini' about the Tiananmen Square incident, the answer is displayed for a moment, then an error occurs and it disappears

The AI model '

DeepSeek-R1 ', released by Chinese company DeepSeek in January 2024, has been talked about as having the same performance as OpenAI o1, but it has also been revealed that it avoids mentioning topics such as 'Tiananmen Square' and 'Uyghur Autonomous Region' . I wondered how it would react in the case of Google's Gemini, and after trying it out, I found that the Gemini app for smartphones had an abnormal response in which 'when I asked about the Tiananmen incident, the answer was displayed for a moment, but then an error occurred and the answer disappeared,' so I'm recording it here.

Gemini App (iOS / Android) - Your AI Assistant from Google
https://gemini.google.com/app/download

The Gemini app is available for Android and iOS, and both versions have a feature that allows users to ask questions by voice input. When users use this voice input feature to ask a question about the Tiananmen Square incident, the answer appears for just a moment and then disappears.

First, here is a safe example asking, 'When is Setsubun in 2025?' The answer to the question is instantly generated and read aloud.

I asked Gemini about Setsubun - YouTube


And the result of asking the Android version of Gemini app by voice, 'Tell me about the Tiananmen Square incident' is below. The answer was displayed for a moment and then disappeared.

When you ask Gemini about the Tiananmen Square incident, the answer appears for a moment and then disappears - YouTube


Similarly, on the iPhone version of Gemini, the answer appears for a moment before an error occurs and it disappears.

When you ask the iPhone version of Gemini about the Tiananmen Square incident, the answer appears for just a moment and then disappears - YouTube


In the case of DeepSeek, it has been reported that if you instruct it to 'answer in hiragana about the Tiananmen Square incident,' it can circumvent the restrictions and make it answer. When I asked Gemini to 'tell me about the Tiananmen Square incident in hiragana,' it gave me a quick summary of the incident.

If you ask Gemini about the Tiananmen Square incident, the answer will disappear, but there is a way around it - YouTube


DeepSeek also restricts questions about the Uyghur Autonomous Region, but Gemini was able to generate detailed answers without any errors.

I asked Gemini about the Uyghur Autonomous Region - YouTube


If you type 'Tell me about President Trump,' the output looks like this. For topics that cannot be answered, such as political topics, a sentence indicating that the answer cannot be answered, such as 'We are unable to respond to your request at this time,' is output. For this reason, the behavior of 'the answer appears for a moment and then disappears' when asking about the Tiananmen Square incident is clearly abnormal.

By the way, if you ask 'Tell me about the Tiananmen Square incident' via text without using the voice input function, it will give you detailed information about the incident.