They do seem capable of some level of self-censorship but the bigger issue is just fundamentally how they’re programmed. The current models have to use the context window to essentially think. That’s why prompts like “explain step by step” help so much, the AI can use its own response window to do some of the thought processing.

It’s like if you didn’t have the ability to have internal thoughts and had to say everything you were thinking out loud in order to be able to think about it. Inevitably you’re going to say inappropriate things because in order to get to the appropriate thing you have to be able to think about the inappropriate thing first. But if all you can do is type what you think then you’re stuck.

AI companies are well aware of this problem and are fixing it but a lot of the currently available models are still based on the old philosophy.