Might be hard to spot if you’re American in the US, but LLMs feel very American even outside of region and language. Concretely, I have to constantly ask for recipes to be changed to metric. Less concretely, the undertones and mannerisms of politeness, positivity and “excitedness” comes across as very American to me, probably even within the rest of the Anglosphere. How would I describe it? Maybe similar to how you’d feel about a mix of Ned Flanders, Ted Lasso and some Valley girl stereotype – im sure it’s a bit off putting also for many Americans.
I guess it’s training data but also heavily RLHF. I doubt that the trainers are aware of their own cultural biases and values, and they may not care. And why should they? In either case, from a thousand yard perspective, it’s probably an effective vector for spreading “American values”, if you will.
Oh absolutely. Early on into the AI craze I tried to use it to summarise my messages[1] and it made them overly fluffy and weird.
Anyone receiving the message would instantly clock that I didn't write it - even with a prompt longer than the original message trying to massage out all of the Americanisms and false enthusiasm. Not a use case that works for me, haha.
[1]: I was trying to use it to shorten my "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter" waffling.
I can't speak to all of the LLMs, but as an American who listens to a LOT of podcasts, I can tell you why these ones sound the way they do: the audience. People who listen to (non-fiction) podcast want to be informed. They are people who are curious about the world around them and are generally interested in self-improvement at some level. Can you imagine a personal finance or health podcast delivered in a pessimistic or even fatalist tone? No, they are all _optimistic_ (even energetic) in tone, because that's the WHOLE reason people are listening to them at all.
I don't think the folks at Google are as patriotic as you think they are.
As an American, I find it exhausting. I think of it as fake Silicon Valley/SF "nice" affect combined with non-US English as a second language floridity. My setup prompt for ChatGPT includes a reminder that if it answers too long or slowly, then it will take time away from my medical research grad students and people will probably die as a result of the delays. It helps a little.
Bring on the one that's all British and snarky!