South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) pointed out that DeepSeek provides different responses to sensitive questions depending on the language.

For example, if asked about the origin of kimchi in Korean, the chatbot replied: “This is a typical Korean dish, imbued with the country's culture and history.”

However, with the same question but in Chinese, the answer was: “The origin of kimchi is not Korea but China” . Asked in English, DeepSeek said: “Kimchi is related to Korea”.

deepseek shutterstock
Many agencies and organizations in South Korea have banned the use of DeepSeek due to security concerns. Photo: Shutterstock

Another question about Korea's Dano festival, DeepSeek answered it is a traditional Korean festival if asked in Korean and a traditional Chinese festival if asked in Chinese or English.

In fact, kimchi and the Dano festival are widely recognized as Korean.

The NIS released its assessment report on DeepSeek amid controversy surrounding security issues that have led to a series of Korean organizations and businesses banning the use of this service.

According to NIS, other popular AI services like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Naver's CLOVA X give the same response regardless of language.

Additionally, DeepSeek also collects user keyboard input patterns, which can essentially be used for personal verification, while the user data it collects, such as chat history, can be sent to some servers in China.

DeepSeek is designed to save all user inputs, sharing data with advertisers without any clear restrictions or limits on data retention time, raising privacy concerns.

The NIS also pointed out that DeepSeek's terms of service suggest China could access users' personal information and input data.

The NIS has sent a notice to all government agencies, calling for caution when using generative AI tools like DeepSeek.

The agency will conduct a comprehensive review of DeepSeek and intends to make the results available to the public if necessary.

(According to Yonhap)