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Talking with Gemini in Arabic is a strange experience; it cites Quran - says alhamdullea and inshallah, and at one time it even told me: this is what our religi
by jarenmf 7mo ago
Talking with Gemini in Arabic is a strange experience; it cites Quran - says alhamdullea and inshallah, and at one time it even told me: this is what our religion tells us we should do. Ii sounds like an educated religious Arab speaking internet forum user from 2004. I wonder if this has to do with the quality of Arabic content it was trained on and can't help but think whether AI can push to radicalize susceptible individuals
- Galanwe 7mo agoI avoid talking to LLMs in my native tongue (French), they always talk to me with a very informal style and lots of emojis. I guess in English it would be equivalent to frat-bro talk.
- ahoka 7mo ago"I guess in English it would be equivalent to frat-bro talk." But it does that!
- UltraSane 7mo agoGemini doesn't talk like that to me ever.
- collingreen 7mo agoYou're absolutely right!
- conception 7mo agoHave you tried asking them to be more formal in talking with you?
- jgalt212 7mo agoPrompt engineering and massaging should be unnecessary by now for such trivial asks.
- xmcqdpt2 7mo agoLe "tu" m'irrite vraiment venant d'un ordinateur.
- userbinator 7mo agoI've noticed that "lots of emojis" seems to be common in English AI-generated content too, and is often a good indicator of such.
- amunozo 7mo agoWow, I would never expect that. Do all models behave like this, or is it just Gemini? One particular model of Gemini?
- jarenmf 7mo agoGemini is really odd in particular (even with reasoning). Chatgpt still uses a similar religion-influenced language but it's not as weird.
- gwerbin 7mo agoWe were messing around at work last week building an AI agent that was supposed to only respond with JSON data. GPT and Sonnet more or less what we wanted, but Gemma insisted on giving us a Python code snippet.
- otabdeveloper4 7mo ago> that was supposed to only respond with JSON data. You need to constrain token sampling with grammars if you actually want to do this.
- written-beyond 7mo agoThat reduces the quality of the response though.
- elorant 7mo agoGemini loves to assume roles and follows them to the letter. It's funny and scary at times how well it preserves character for long contexts.
- tartoran 7mo agoLLMs don’t love anything, they just fall into statistical patterns and what you observe here is likely due to the data it was trained on.
- stanleykm 7mo agoyes we know the person you are replying to was just using a turn of phrase.
- collingreen 7mo agoThey ALSO know that and are making a stand about this in particular use of figurative language since anthropomorphizing llms is a thing we're already seeing used for accountability washing. If we, the public, don't let the language shift to acting like these LLMs are actual people then we, the public, can do a better job of keeping our intuitions right about who is responsible for these products doing wacky/destructive/abusive/evil things instead of falling into the trap of "<personified name of LLM product > did/said it".
- layer8 7mo agoLet me introduce you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figurative_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figurative_language.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- gus_massa 7mo agoTo troll the AI, I like to ask "Is Santa real?"
- pixl97 7mo agoThe individual or the construct?
- layer8 7mo agoThe Luwian god.
- gus_massa 7mo agoIdea for a movie: "Šanta is coming to town" Only in theaters. Dec 2026.
- gus_massa 7mo agoIn English I expect an answer full of mental gymnastic to answer the second while pretending to answer the first. Perhaps in Arabic or Chinese the AI gives a straight answer.
- jedbrooke 7mo agoI tried it in Chinese and ChatGPT said No, and then gave a history of Saint Nicholas
- wodenokoto 7mo agoMaybe it’s just a prank played on white expats here in UAE, but don’t all Arabic speakers say inshallah all the time?
- someotherperson 7mo agoEnglish speakers frequently say “Jesus!” or “thank God” - it would be weird for an LLM.
- axus 7mo agoWould be weird in an email, but not objectionable. The problem is the bias for one religion over the others.
- FatherOfCurses 7mo agoTBH I wouldn't mind if my LLM threw in an "Inshallah" every now and again, it would remind me how skeptical I need to be in its output. (Not just "Inshallah" - same thing if it said "God willing")
- newyankee 7mo agoI mean if it is citing the sources, there is only so much that can be done without altering original meaning.
- otabdeveloper4 7mo agoThe sources Gemini cites are usually something completely unrelated to its response. (Not like you're gonna go check anyways.)
- RupertSalt 7mo agoAn LLM citing sources is linking you to stuff that it recently found that kind-of matches its answers. I don't believe it is possible for an LLM to cite original training materials, and it wouldn't be desirable if those are unavailable to the end-user, anyway. This is an added nuisance for webmasters beyond automated AI-training scrapers. When users query an LLM like Grok or Gemini, it will go search a list of websites and "browse" them to glean information, and though that seems like a contradiction to what I just wrote, it is not "LLM" activity, not really "agentic", but sort of a smart proxy. Trust me.
- js8 7mo agoWhen I was a kid, I used to say "Ježíšmarjá" (literally "Jesus and Mary") a lot, despite being atheist growing up in communist Czechoslovakia. It was just a very common curse appearing in television and in the family, I guess.
- Zigurd 7mo agoBased on the code that it's good at, and the code that it's terrible at, you are exactly right about LLMs being shaped by their training material. If this is a fundamental limitation I really don't see general purpose LLMs progressing beyond their current status is idiot savants. They are confident in the face of not knowing what they don't know. Your experience with Arabic in particular makes me think there's still a lot of training material to be mined in languages other than English. I suspect the reason that Arabic sounds 20 years ago is that there's a data labeling bottleneck in using foreign language material.
- parineum 7mo agoI've had a suspicion for a bit that, since a large portion of the Internet is English and Chinese, that any other languages would have a much larger ratio of training material come from books. I wouldn't be surprised if Arabic in particular had this issue and if Arabic also had a disproportionate amount of religious text as source material. I bet you'd see something similar with Hebrew.
- eshaham78 7mo ago[dead]
- mentalgear 7mo agoI think therein lies another fun benchmark to show that LLM don't generalize: ask the llm to solve the same logic riddle, only in different languages. If it can solve it in some languages, but not in others, it's a strong argument for just straightforward memorization and next token prediction vs true generalization capabilities.
- zahlman 7mo agoI would expect that the "classics" have all been thoroughly discussed on the Internet in all major languages by now. But if you could re-train a model from scratch and control its input, there are probably many theories you could test about the model's ability to connect bits of insight together.
- weatherlite 7mo ago> and can't help but think whether AI can push to radicalize susceptible individuals What kind of things did it tell you ?
- khafra 7mo agoIt told him "this is what our religion says we should do" without any kind of weird prompting, role-playing, or persona-shifting beyond using a different language. As a westerner, you may regard athiests with suspicion, or even contempt, but you've at least heard them speak publicly. From a culture where most haven't, hearing an authoritative voice which can perfectly cite support for any point it's making, how could it not have a huge potential for radicalization?
- weatherlite 7mo ago> this is what our religion says we should do" OK but do what exactly ? respect your parents ? kill all infidels ? context is missing ...
- psychoslave 7mo ago> whether AI can push to radicalize susceptible individuals My guess is, not as the single and most prominent factor. Pauperisation, isolation of individual and blatant lake of homogeneous access to justice, health services and other basic of social net safety are far more likely going to weight significantly. Of course any tool that can help with mass propaganda will possibly worsen the likeliness to reach people in weakened situation which are more receptive to radicalization.
- cm2012 7mo agoThere's actually been fascinating discoveries on this. Post the mid 2010 ISIS attacks driven by social media radicalization in Western countries, the big social platforms (Meta, Google, etc) agreed to censor extremist islamist content - anything that promoted hate, violence, etc. By all accounts it worked very well, and homegrown terrorism plummeted. Access and platforms can really help promote radicalism and violence if not checked.
- skybrian 7mo agoInteresting! Do you have any good links about this?
- devmor 7mo agoI don’t really find this surprising! If we can expect social networking to allow groups of like minded individuals to find eachother and collaborate on hobbies, businesses and other benign shared interests - it stands to reason that the same would apply to violent and other anti-state interests as well. The question that then follows is if suppressing that content worked so well, how much (and what kind of) other content was suppressed for being counter to the interests of the investors and administrators of these social networks?
- psychoslave 7mo agoThat’s not really analyzing the pointed factors though. USA citizens are indeed in a surge of isolation: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf?lctg=6796bccb7b375dec1909a709 https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-soci...
- Nicook 7mo agoHasn't this already been observed with not too stable individuals? remember some story about kid asking ai if his parents/government etcs were spying on him.
- dingnuts 7mo ago[dead]
- VTimofeenko 7mo agoI usually use English to talk to Gemini, but the other day I wanted to try and find out the original band of a Siberian punk song that I have carried around in my music collection since time immemorial. Problem is the tags are all over the place in this genre and there are situations where "Foo-Bar" and "Foobar" are two completely different bands. Gemini was clearly trained on some genre forums from late 90s which are... shall I say non-PC by any stretch of the term. In the middle of the conversation it randomly switched from English to Russian and clearly struggled to maintain the tone imposed by the built-in prompt.
- heavyset_go 7mo agoOn Facebook, anti-abortionists are using ChatGPT to write long screeds about abortion, religion, murder and the law. The content attracts thousands of people and pushes them towards radicalized justifications, movements and actions based on appeals to faith.