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

Good work. I've often found llm's to be "stupider" when speaking Norwegian than when speaking English, so it's not surprising to find they hallucinate more and can't stick to their instructions in other non-English languages.

This feels like an opportunity for afversatial truth-gindibg, like the legal system uses. If bias is inevitable, then have at least two AIS with opposing viewpoints summarize the same material, and then ... well, I guess I'm not sure how you get the third AI to judge ...

Great and important work!

This is related to why current Babelfish-like devices make me uneasy: they propagate bad and sometimes dangerous translations along the lines of "Traduttore, traditore" ('Translator, traitor'). The most obvious example in the context of Persian is of "marg bar Aamrikaa". If you ask the default/free model on ChatGPT to translate, it will simply tell you it means 'Death to America'. It won't tell you "marg bar ..." is a poetic way of saying 'down with ...'. [1]

It's even a bit more than that: translation technology promotes the notion that translation is a perfectly adequate substitute for actually knowing the source language (from which you'd like to translate something to the 'target' language). Maybe it is if you're a tourist and want to buy a sandwich in another country. But if you're trying to read something more substantial than a deli menu, you should be aware that you'll only kind of, sort of understand the text via your default here's-what-it-means AI software. Words and phrases in one language rarely have exact equivalents in another language; they have webs of connotation in each that only partially overlap. The existence of quick [2] AI translation hides this from you. The more we normalise the use of such tech as a society, the more we'll forget what we knew we didn't know.

[1] https://archive.fo/iykh0

[2] I'm using the qualifier 'quick' because AI can of course present us with the larger context of all the connotations of a foreign word, but that's an unlikely option in a real-time mass-consumer device.

And that’s why we have the race.