Comment by Barrin92
5 days ago
>Current-best models are pretty fluent at major languages and cultures
strong disagree on that one. As a German interacting with ChatGPT, even in German it gives me the feeling of talking to the Pluribus people, which reminds me of an anecdote of Walmart failing in Germany because people were freaked out by the constantly upbeat, smiling employees.
Understanding a culture is a very different task than translating the syntax of a text, and these systems might be capable of syntactic fluency but they do not really understand culture. You have to metaphorically abuse these models until they stop sounding like the crossover of a HR department person and a Mormon missionary
I'm Finnish and dear god I hate the default overtly friendly tones of LLMs. Always the first thing to tune in system prompt.
You're a machine, stop anthropomorphizing yourself and pretending to be my best friend, and just give me the damn answer and nothing else. :D
I fully agree. I'm Swedish and have recently used GPT to help me draft some cover letters in Swedish. Even with all the mandatory personality tweaks and prompting, it always seems to default to highly florid and self-congratulatory Americanisms if I'm not careful. It's very subtle.
I do understand where proponents of language equivalency are coming from. LLMs seem to be extremely good at answering simple, one-shot type questions and mechanical 'low-level' translations for most languages. I feel like as soon as you introduce complex chains of thought or multi-step cross-linguistic tasks, minor imperfections stack and become magnified, just as with coding tasks or context rot.
Set the personality to 'Robot', it makes the interactions so much more tolerable.