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AI tools are making the world look weird
81–90 of 203 posts
Re: AI tools are making the world look weird
#82I have saved instructions for Gemini to translate queries into the local language then retranslate the output back to English, when asking about non-English speaking countries/cultures. It seems to work fairly well, but I think it's just due to the different content trained in that language; obviously there would be more in depth discussion of Indonesian cuisine in Indonesian. Whether the country is rich or democrati…
That's interesting! I manually do the same by prompting in the target language, since it drastically changes the results.
This has been true of web search since forever mind you. The wev has always been culturally delineated by language, and the English Web as I call it is not the only web.
Re: AI tools are making the world look weird
#83“Do non-American LLMs (e.g. DeepSeek, Mistral, Apertus) perform better or worse here? Do they have their own cultural biases in-built?” I'm wondering the same thing, in addition to the related question of “Would an LLM perform better or worse if prompted with languages other than English?”.
I assume the training dataset is mostly the same anyway. I imagine prompting in different language could have a huge effect though.
Re: AI tools are making the world look weird
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was using Qwen3 locally in thinking mode, and noted that even if it is talking to me in Japanese, it is doing it's "thinking" steps in English. Not having a full understanding of how the layers in an LLM handle language connections I can't say for sure, but for a human this would result in subpar outcomes. For example (not actual output): Input: "こにちは"(konichwa) Qwen Thinking: "Ah, the user has said "こにちは", I shoul…
Perhaps it knows most users who misspell こんにちは are English speakers?
Ah nah, that was just me here, I'm no good with the phone IME. I tried a bunch of different sentences. It always thought in English.
It was pretty good at one shot translations with thinking turned off however, I imagine thinking distracts it from going down the Japanese only vector paths.
Re: AI tools are making the world look weird
#85For those interested, you can see the World Values Survey Questionnaire here: https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV7.jsp
(For Wave 7 (2017-2022), which the paper used)
Some of the questions don't really make sense to ask an LLM (being about the survey taker's personal financial situation and such), but the paper doesn't seem to go into detail of what questions were used.
Re: AI tools are making the world look weird
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t have the data but I assume the corpus available to train an LLM is majorly in English, written by Americans and western counterparts. If we’re training the LLMs to sound similar to the training data, I imagine the responses have to match that world view. My anecdote is that before LLMs I would default to search Google in English instead of my own native language simply because there was so much more content i…
english is the lingua franca ;-)
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Re: AI tools are making the world look weird
#87There is undoubtedly a real effect here, but IMHO one problem with the original article is that it treats the US as the only reference point. On the one hand, this reflects the US dominant position in world affairs and the fact that probably most of the training materials come from there. But on the other hand, there are some outlier results that are left unexplained. For example, ChatGPT is even more aligned with Ja…
> For example, ChatGPT is even more aligned with Japan than with the US I have no expertise in this field. Is it actually even more aligned? Or is it simply aligned with the elements of Japanese culture and/or media that are exported to the West?
By the same graph, Japan is rated as more culturally distant from the US than Singapore, Russia, and Zimbabwe.
Re: AI tools are making the world look weird
#88Can’t recommend the book that coined this acronym enough: The WEIRDest People in the World Book by Joseph Henrich. It is such an eye-opening piece that explains so much of the world around us. He’s an anthropologist that goes into the psychology of it all. Touching on points like how religion plays a part in shaping the America of today and even how humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discer…
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Re: AI tools are making the world look weird
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
After finding out even Think Fast, Slow (a book from a very creditable researcher and nobel laureate) is full of replication crisis, I approach pop-sci as entertainment instead of self-education.
*nobel memorial laureate. This is exactly why people get annoyed with the branding of the bank of Sweden’s economics prize. We have yet to see the prize for chemistry awarded for research that does not reproduce.
The peace prize is awarded to warmongers all the time though.
Re: AI tools are making the world look weird
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discern letters and words and dedicate brain power for that. I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but my gut tells me this risks being one of those bold claims that grows legs and runs for a while until we debunk it.
I'm struggling to think of any way to test the hypothesis which is (A) practical and (B) accurate. For example, suppose you sampled a group today and found an inverse-correlation between "good at recognizing many faces" and "good at recognizing written text"... That still wouldn't show that one facility grew causing the other to shrink, because maybe people are just born (or early-development-ed) with a certain bias.
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