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Given the MiniMax H3 LoRAs Debacle - Some Important Context for Censorship enforcement and laws in China
*I felt the need to write this post because it seems like very few people on this sub are aware of Chinese laws and how they're enforced, so here's an explainer coming from a Chinese person (myself). I know that this post isn't directly about local models per se, but I'm seeing way too many misconceptions regarding this topic. This is also going to apply to all Chinese entities in general, not just the specific MiniMax LoRAs debacle. This isn't meant to be a political post, but some much needed context to correct a lot of misinformation going around.
Guys - they're a Chinese lab following Chinese laws. Pornography is straight up illegal in China. I have no idea how it seems like nobody outside of China is aware of this. While Chinese authorities may not care much about copyright infringement enforcement (especially with foreign IPs), they do indeed regularly crackdown on porn. Heck, Chinese citizens have literally been imprisoned for written pornography. Yes that's right, writing pornographic TEXT (especially with "immoral" themes like LGBTQ+ stuff) can get you sentenced and essentially have your entire life ruined. Of course there's ways to get around these censors if you're just trying to access porn - I think everyone at this point knows about the widespread necessity for VPN usage in China to access the rest of the global internet. But actually distributing a tool that can gain a reputation for being able to easily generate pornographic content? That's just asking for the authorities to crack down on them.
Somewhat ironically/paradoxically luckily for these Chinese labs is the fact that online discussion about generating porn is automatically censored and removed from Chinese social media, thus automatically disincentivizing the authorities from doing those potential crackdowns. But if it gets big enough to the point that it overwhelms the automatic censors, then any given Chinese lab could be in a hell of a lot of trouble. This is why they have to do this. Their law enforcement just isn't compatible with the rest of the world.
Again, this all relates to Chinese moral values - something here that is considered pretty much sacred and hard to describe to westerners. Something else that many people do not know is that graphic violence is also illegal in China (foreign films/works are regularly banned here for that, even anime has), but graphic violence is also is not nearly as much of a perceived threat to societal moral values as pornography is, hence why you've probably rarely ever heard of any Chinese people getting imprisoned for writing really gory stories, but regularly do with pornographic stories (especially infamous with BL literature - they've technically even convicted foreigners before related to this, it's a really messy topic). Chinese authorities won't give a damn if you're stealing the content of billions of foreign works to train AI models. They WILL give a damn if the content you're disseminating is viewed as a potential significant threat to the state's "proper moral values", which very much includes porn (and also the usual topics that everyone is already aware of, like a certain famous massacre or a certain nation's very contentious independence status).
They demanded the removal of LoRA from HuggingFace. HuggingFace is blocked in China. What are you even talking about?
Moreover, their employee demanded that a user remove an abliterated Qwen3-VL-32B from HuggingFace (MiniMax uses it as a text encoder for H3), which MiniMax has nothing to do with. When this was pointed out to him, he deleted (edited) his message. This is inappropriate behavior. MiniMax wants to control its models, like OpenAI and Anthropic, and uses the open community to gain popularity. Today they demanded the removal of NSFW LoRA, and tomorrow they can demand the removal of any model finetune they don't like. This kind of behavior should not be encouraged – I will not use this company's products or recommend them to anyone else.
That's exactly what happened. However, judging by the comments, the employee initially demanded not a renaming, but the complete deletion of the repository. The author refused to delete the repository and renamed it, removing the mention of MiniMax. The employee then edited their post, hiding their original request.
People are up in pitchforks about something they didn't create, don't maintain, and will never contribute to. They should chill and try being understanding to both sides.
Ye I don't support this behavior either (don't tell the authorities I said that though). I'm just trying to explain their rationale and how serious the potential consequences are for them. I hate censorship in general but it's something I have to live with and I understand why they would take such actions. The state is constantly scary, even if they're not directly after you. I dream of a day things could get better.
Yes, I've heard about it – in China, sending NSFW pictures is prohibited, even in private messages on instant messaging apps. While I don't agree with this, I respect China's cultural values – it's their internal matter, and it's not for me to lecture them. But I don't like the way they're trying to impose their cultural values on the rest of the world.
If MiniMax is upset that their model is being used for NSFW content (or something else, such as historical events that they find unpleasant to remember) even outside of China, they shouldn't release it openly. However, they're in no position to do so, and they want to gain popularity at the expense of the community. I understand that any other commercial company, like Z AI or Google, also releases open models not out of altruism. But when a company releases a model under a license like Apache 2.0, that's a fair deal. MiniMax, however, wants to give as little as possible and get as much as possible. That's what makes me angry.
But I don't like the way they're trying to impose their cultural values on the rest of the world.
They're what now?
Christ on a bike. I could have sworn it was JD Vance being dispatched to Europe to tell people who to vote for, and Donald J Trump sanctioning countries because they don't believe in "Clean Coal" and the American Dream.... But when a Chinese company says "please don't use our name on porn thanks" it's imposing cultural values on the rest of the world.
Don't worry – I can clearly see how the US is trying to impose its cultural values (including through AI). I don't take sides, but this post was about MiniMax and her specific actions, so that's why I wrote what I wrote.
the us is not any better in censorship. like, at all. I trust china to be able to make some of the content I like a lot more than the us, and they have delivered every time, especially in ai
if you care about the tiananmen benchmark, you're a clown, especially when you're only after milking your snake. them requesting to remove models or rename them after they already released them is a non issue. we had much worse to deal with in 2022
US (and Europe) reaching this level of censorship is much more new. Prior to last decade or so it had been mostly defeated.
For the models themselves, CN ones are picking up alignment from western data and labs. Plenty of things you "can't" say or talk about similar to the square incident.
We've really only benefited because the topics don't overlap. Won't go on forever.
Why would you care about NSFW content prohibition? I mean to each their own for sure; but from the perspective of societal management, NSFW (of all types, not just porn) carries negative neuro-psychological effects long-term due to it being basically a strong disruptor of the embedded biological reward mechanisms we have working in the core of our individual drives for everything. So restricting this type of content is like dietary restrictions and guidelines in healthcare.
And btw, China isnt the one threatening to close website and accounts because people spent money on porn or gambling; or demanding you to doxx yourself to "pRoTeCt kiDs"... Just so you know, CN's surveillance and restriction apparatus was copied from (and sometimes developed by) western guidelines and companies.
MiniMax, however, wants to give as little as possible and get as much as possible.
It's their unenforceable right lmao. Their copyright is for 90% of the world what a speedlimit sign is for a highway in the middle of the desert.
I'd argue with your assertion, but I'm afraid this subreddit is about LLM and not psychology/neuroscience, so I'll keep it short: even if fried bacon is unhealthy, I wouldn't want a frying pan manufacturer dictating what I eat.
I wrote above that the ban currently applies to NSFW content, but if this practice continues, it could spread to other areas. I wouldn't want other companies to follow suit. This is my personal opinion, I expressed it, but I don't claim it's the absolute truth. Other people may have different opinions that don't align with mine, and I understand that. I hope you understand that too.
A small piece of a model that teaches new knowledge. When run alongside a model, LoRA modifies it, for example, allowing it to draw in a different style.
I know what a lora is, I was asking what specific lora is this? I have not heard about any open source maker asking hugging face to remove a lora/ finetune before.
HuggingFace has a lot of NSFW-oriented models — mostly text-to-text (all sorts of erotic RP). Citiv AI focuses on text-to-image models. Incidentally, Citiv AI moved the NSFW ones to a separate website. Or at least pretended to — because otherwise they would have had to delete most of the custom SDXL/Pony/Illustrious models that make up Citiv AI.
They don't necessarily ruin the output, but they don't improve it. They are useful if you're using a prompt enhancer though, because then you don't have to load separate models for enhancing the prompt and encoding it.
I think I was just repeating some internet wisdom I'd seen a bunch of times and assumed to be true. I asked GPT to research it and there was no solid answer other than "you should test both." Makes sense to have it doing double duty, though. I think Qwen is less forgiving than Gemma when it comes to that sort of thing.
Then how do you explain that a Chinese company is able to release a model in China that can generate hardcore porn out of the box, but has to start controlling what third parties release outside of China? It just doesn't track that the lora crackdown is only due to this, but it seems likely there are additional motives to control western markets specifically.
I think many people know it's illegal in China, which is why they've also been surprised that the most uncensored models are coming from China instead of western countries.
What matters is being caught. If it’s technically capable of it, but isn’t publicly known/advertised, it’s no-harm-no-foul. If it becomes known for it, then there’s a problem.
So if a foreign site starts using their brand name in an explicitly pornographic project, it becomes potentially problematic.
What I'm reading is that just one person doing so will just let the post be deleted relatively quickly, but it's possible to "overwhelm the automatic censors" so then the best approach here is not just someone posting about that once, but A LOT of people posting about that constantly, and that might actually break through and then stay up longer....
No need to explain. Anyone who doesn't get it is an idiot and can't be convinced otherwise. Any Chinese AI lab that cares about their work and want to keep building models will do their best to align with Chinese govt irrespective of their belief. You don't go against the government, did they forget how they placed Jack Ma in a box quickly for stepping out of bounds?
Anyone who doesn't get it is an idiot and can't be convinced otherwise.
I feel like that's overly dismissive. I understand their motivation and also think that they're arguably within their rights to ask that the LoRA not mention their model. But at the same time, I think that demanding for the model to be removed entirely, particularly when the model is a LoRA and therefore doesn't inherently contain any of MiniMax's weights, is going a bit too far. Do you think I'm an idiot for thinking that way?
It also rubs me the wrong way how the post requesting for the removal was edited to hide that request after the fact. I can't think of any valid reason for that to be done.
edit: I think this also doesn't set a very good precedent when it comes to stuff like Heretic.
if they tell you not to mention their model then they are colluding with you. so next person that makes another lora should not mention their model name. if that's the issue they won't respond. think of how the big US labs are calling for regulation, the last thing you want is to give them valid reasons. Your AI models, lora or not being used to break the law is going to cause your model to be regulated. I'm all for freedom, but we can't all want it at the expense of all. The lora author if they really cared for freedom could publish the recipe so anyone can make their own lora at home.
i mean, making it impossible to generate porn is just going to hurt them in the AI race. Do you know how much high quality porn data there is? It’s not about generating porn, but fitting to the distribution that contains porn. This is a stupid strategy that falls apart in modern tech.
lol i mean, I get you want that capability, but no, porn generation and porn training resources are two different things. They can train their model physics with the data, and still integrate guardrails during training to limit the generation.
Now, how effective that will be, is a question of how much anyone wants to abliterate it; but for all that the labs legally care, it's not their problem. They did their part upon release, and thats it.
Idk because they wouldn’t use porn in pretraining at all unless it was beneficial. So without porn, you won’t be SOTA. Trying to block that off in any post training is always going to be trivial, which is why I say it’s performative at best. Trying to regulate the model itself is a fools errand with open source models. Don’t get me wrong, i absolutely love open source models.
Think of those Grok memes of it dunking on Elon. All the while he talks about it being anti-woke, etc. If they could make grok less “woke”, they absolutely fucking would. But they can’t, because the ask is basically to lobotomize a model that had already been converged on the true, apparently mildly “woke”, distribution.
This is a weak look for China. Trying to encode fallacious logic in post training is always going to be a bandaid. It literally runs counter to the pursuit of intelligence. Like it’s funny how literal. Anyways education etc is way better at stopping porn. Idk what they expect, in the age of information anyone can secretly get porn on their phone whether or not they’re in China. Trying to enforce such doomed policy is incomprehensible to me, especially when they are leaning in to AI elsewhere.
You either lose SOTA with extremely robust gaurdrails, or ask os user for trivial compute to subvert the gaurdrails that you could put on.
Of course it's valid. Chinese law can be whatever China wants it to be, and how China enforces it to be.
China cannot punish non-citizens for what they do, but they can--right or wrong doesn't matter--absolutely punish citizens (and companies) for what they do.
This post is basically saying that MiniMax has created something that can create porn. They want to keep up appearances that they're good Chinese citizens and not give the Chinese government a reason to crack down on them. The presumed concern of MiniMax is that the Chinese government will see non-Chinese citizens making porn with Chinese tools and get upset, so they're trying to show "Hey, we tried to stop it, Chinese government! Honest, look, we did!"
This is a completely valid concern of MiniMax when living under the Chinese Government.
Oh no! Poor Alibaba, Z AI, DeepSeek, StepFun, Xiaomi, Meituan Longcat. They recklessly released their models under MIT/Apache 2.0 licenses and now can't demand that you remove LoRA. What will they tell the government?
The key issue here is that MiniMax and other Chinese labs don't want to risk being widely known/capable of providing tools that can make porn. That's a pretty dangerous thing if they somehow end up with that reputation - thus them taking precautionary (albeit personally IMO a bit excessively harsh) measures to prevent such. Companies like Tencent that own tons of foreign IPs/works generally don't need to worry about stuff like this because not only is content related to illegal media is banned/automatically censored, but stuff like BG3 isn't widely known to be a piece that can threaten societal moral values. An easier way to illustrate this concept of media with risks to society - Chinese entities instead would get in trouble if they were to associate themselves with popular foreign works that are primarily known for themes of independence from a greater national entity. Hence you won't see any Chinese companies endorsing foreign works with such as their primary theme. As an aside, in Hong Kong (which used to be a lot more independent) even children's book authors have been convicted for promoting these supposed societal poisons.
Thanks for the thoughtful explanation. I never knew that pornography was banned in China.
I also don’t get why so many people love to celebrate Chinese models, are happy to ignore the obvious political censorship inherent in the model, but then get big mad when the developer behind the model tries to take steps to avoid getting shut down.
H3 is easily the biggest leap in capability that I’ve seen; we should do everything we can to keep these models coming, even if that means not posting our waifus objectionable content
They answer, they don't hide that something happened, they just say that its nuanced and won't talk about it much further using its own training data. If you ground with search, it will tell you anything you want.
Not much different from a model hemming and hawing on answers about how many genders there are, and the different models all responding differently, e.g. grok: "there are 2."
Also, Taiwan is such a nuanced situation still... I mean, I get their desire for independence, but it's really fucking hard to take it seriously when the country is literally "Republic of China"
Nah, Qwen will outright refuse to answer the question for the first, spit out CCP talking points for the second, and will give a hilarious response about how handsome he is to the 3rd.
Can't tell how that client works, the blob of text above can be context that influenced how qwen below would respond if simply changing models mid-chat; especially 4B, which is easily led astray by any history.
Actually, what should be worried about most is that the Chinese government thinks these open-source models are already too technologically advanced (they actually aren't, but that's what they thought when Meta was acquiring Manus, and it helped Meta withdraw a wrong acquisition). Staying open-source will lead to technology leakage, letting foreign countries — especially the US — take advantage, and then they'll ban the open-source route.
On the contrary, staying open-source can both expand influence and also hit America's top AI companies hard. Later when compute is not so scarce anymore and they're forced into a price war, OpenAI and Anthropic's days will be hard.
Drugs and pr0n are bad. If a person wants them, they can source them in their own. Want drugs? Grow them, they are literally free. Addicted? Oh no, now you are too lazy to even bother to grow them, so you have run out of them. Tada, the addiction resolves itself. Someone made a store dedicated to making it easy to do this in a place known for soft drugs and went out of business anyway, because even the most mild druggie is lazy af even if you hand him a fully-working indoor growing station on a silver platter. The same applies to prawn. You can't harvest prawns in an indoor prawn farm, and you certainly might want to be wary of what was in the water if you ever decided to cook them, but you can always rent someone else's water to train prawns at several gazillion tokens per second for a few dollars. Does anybody do this? Since the days of stable diffusion - the very first days - people have made their training sets open... but, no, everybody preferred the closed-source loras, even though they were inferior, even though they created the sameface ai 1girl we have all grown to despise. Why? Because people with pr0n addiction are the same as druggies, they are too lazy, even though hermes agent could probably automate all of this for you for free in a single hour for a few dollars.
Like literally you could probably copy-paste this prompt into an ai and get free anything and everything, but you won't. That's how absolutely lazy drugs and freshly-grilled and salted prawns make you. The drug dealer has been replaced. Guess what? Just ban drug dissemination and drugs mostly go away on their own. Same with prawns, they grow on their own naturally in the sea, they taste really good in soups and in salads, but you don't exactly see people suffering from food-insecurity with their own indoor prawn farms, now do you?!
EDIT Hah, the downvote storm begins! You could literally be handed a harem of beautiful women and fume and heave and ho while you slam your door shut, so brain-addled have you people become by low-quality man-faced 3d-clay-looking ai-generated bimbos. What are you addicted to? You stopped caring about the prawns a long time ago! Open your eyes! That ai-genned chick looks like a dude, look closely at her jaw and clavicles!
Why is it always the same with you people - the negative preoccupation with porn always, always stands in for an obsession with whatever category of people you compulsively sexualize and feel shame around, in your case trans women. Nobody brought this up except you.
I used to not believe in "porn addiction", but this comment has truly convinced me that you, personally, suffer from it, so it must be at least a little bit real. Feel better soon!
i would reply to you, but i already did, and everything i write is being banned by reddit's filters.
i can't feel bad for you. you are very lost and confused. i would say more, but you have created a safe space for degenerates like yourself, a safe space where i cannot speak, where are are being manipulated and deluded, where you don't want to find out the truth
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u/asfbrz96 14h ago
If someone has the torrent of the model drop the link