Can LLMs have an "accent" like second language speakers?

#1

Post by hmokiguess » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 12:36 AM UTC

I'm not sure how to best characterize what I just experienced with Opus 5 but my attempt to describe it, and hopefully this doesn't offend anyone, is that it "spoke" with an "accent" to me.

By speaking I don't mean voice mode, but it wrote the following and I will omit for brevity:

"... stuff ... dry-run ... more stuff"

"... 死run ... stuff"

I had to lookup what 死 was because I don't speak chinese, and I found it means "die" and I thought it was too weird of a coincidence because in foreigners accent I have heard "dry" sound like "die" before.

Am I crazy? Who wants to take a crack at this

Re: Can LLMs have an "accent" like second language speakers?

#2

Post by keiferski » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

I get strange little bugs like this all the time. I don't think it's an accent, just a bug.

Re: Can LLMs have an "accent" like second language speakers?

#3

Post by hmokiguess » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #2

I get strange little bugs like this all the time. I don't think it's an accent, just a bug.

Can you share some of yours?

My calling of it an “accent” was more on the lines of this perhaps being a feature of language and how it’s encoded in latent spaces, I wonder if “fixing it” is not necessarily helpful in terms of knowledge representation.

Not sure I’m making any sense tbh, philosophizing here

Re: Can LLMs have an "accent" like second language speakers?

#4

Post by keiferski » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

hmokiguess wrote: post #3

keiferski wrote: post #2

I get strange little bugs like this all the time. I don't think it's an accent, just a bug.

Can you share some of yours? My calling of it an “accent” was more on the lines of this perhaps being a feature of language and how it’s encoded in latent spaces, I wonder if “fixing it” is not necessarily helpful in terms of knowledge representation. Not sure I’m making any sense tbh, philosophizing here

Sometimes it will make the title of a conversation in a random language (like Spanish) even though it has nothing to do with the language.

Other times it just adds random Chinese or Russian characters.

Re: Can LLMs have an "accent" like second language speakers?

#5

Post by buildinext » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 3:31 PM UTC

interesting...some models are claiming accent either input or output i've noticed.

Re: Can LLMs have an "accent" like second language speakers?

#6

Post by PaiDxng » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 5:42 AM UTC

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