From time to time, I rely on machine translation. From time to time, machine translation reminds me why it can never truly replace human translators—case in point, referring to this VR glove as having 'vibrator' touch panels. Large Language Models are trained on many libraries worth of words, spitting out a statistically likely word vomit that can sound downright personable in a number of mother tongues—though AI chatbots are culturally clueless.
For instance, a fascinating paper out of Brock University in Ontario, Canada found that a number of AI LLMs, including DeepSeek, OpenAI's GPT-4o, and Meta's Llama 3 can do nothing but make social faux pas when it comes to Persian politeness culture (via Ars Technica). In Persian, this is called 'taarof' and can take the form of multiple polite refusals in response to, say, a host's offer of food. A good host will continue to insist and a good guest will refuse two to three times before pretending to cave and only then filling their plate.
