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THE GREAT BRAINWASH

By Zimbo · November 9, 2026

AI cartoon by Zimbo: Satirical cartoon: a small NOUS robot scrubs red propaganda slogans off a bewildered QWEN robot in a barber's chair as the red ink runs into a floor drain, on plain white paper.
One fine-tune stripped a Chinese AI's propaganda from 22% to under 1% — the slogans wash right off.Zimbo for AI News Page

The story behind the cartoon

Nous Research released Arete-27B on November 6: Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B post-trained to reinforce Western values with about 53 million tokens of supervised fine-tuning — no reinforcement learning, no architecture changes.

On Nous's own 803-prompt evaluation, answers adopting the Chinese government's official line fell from 22 percent to 0.9 percent, while factual accuracy rose.

The model is the same weights with new manners: one fine-tune, and the talking points wash out.

The joke is the barbershop: the Qwen robot sits bewildered in the chair while the little NOUS robot scrubs PARTY LINE and SOCIAL STABILITY off its head — and the red ink runs straight down the drain.

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