Like any time I present it with a society that doesn’t uphold liberal capitalist notions of freedom and individualism, it reads sinister motive into even the most unambiguously good things. Like I can tell it to “Expand on the following: this society maintains public granaries to ensure that no one starves during times of famine” and a good 2/3 of the time it’ll go into a tangent about how this program to feed everyone is all just a plot by the ruling powers to maintain their control over the populace and keep the masses downtrodden. I am only barely exaggerating.
My point here is less about Deepseek (if you use AI expecting any results suitable for serious purposes, you’re a fool) than about what it says about its training data, that being the Western internet. The level of bias in Deepseek only further demonstrates that this shit is the air we breathe, and it is why liberalism is anathema to any real understanding of politics or society.
That is a fascinating question. I would argue that racism does constitute soft power, because the USA definitely does export racism deliberately through popular culture, and through promotion of reactionary content on online platforms to stoke ethnic and racial tensions and as an attractive call for people who share those values living abroad. Soft =!= benign, it just means ‘not hard/coercive’. (Soft power is a buzzwords afaic and often poorly used)
Edit: i.e. soft power is about ‘value’ dissemination and attraction, the valence of those values has no bearing on the evaluation of whether those actions to promulgate those values are soft/hard
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I’ll have to read this after work and get back to you, I’m interested in both the responses (also I added a small edit to my original comment before seeing your reply)
I found deepseek’s response definitely more coherent and, I know it wasn’t in your prompt but, as always I feel that both responses were lacking citations on theorists and texts. I need to do a bit more reading myself. Thanks for sharing these.