Comment on AI Models Falter Answering Election Questions in Spanish.
eldavi@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
mistranslations into spanish seemed common everywhere i’ve lived in the last 5 decades; california, new york, new jersey, texas, chicago; and it doesn’t seem to matter that there are plenty of fluent & native spanish speakers in all of those places.
i’m a software developer now and did IT for 15 years before that and it seemed clear to me that american-born native spanish speakers are rare in software engineering compared to IT. i think that this is the first time that my anecdotal evidence has been confirmed. (somehow foreign-born spanish speakers have even representation throughout this industry like most everyone else).
QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This isn’t an article about mistranslations.
This is an article focusing on how asking about US election questions in Spanish will give you answers that are for the wrong country, or just wrong in most cases when compared to asking the same question in English.
One example is that, if someone in Puerto Rico were to ask ChatGPT 4/Claude/Gemini/Llama/Mixtral a US Election question, it would respond with information for Venezuela/Mexico/Spain instead.
eldavi@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
i’m addressing the underlying issue behind llm’s and any other sort of ai; the software engineers who create and work on them come from a cultural paradigm that doesn’t include anything but a few languages and spanish isn’t one of them.
that results in strange behaviors like the one the article mentions here. other examples like face recognition issues is another manifestation of that paradigm.
QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I understand, that definitely makes sense then.
eldavi@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
it doesn’t to me.
the sheer number of american born spanish speakers alone is well past the critical level necessary for the type of full representation that other industries experience, but software engineering is stubbornly not budging so they’re going to IT.
i think that the closest thing there is to representation in software engineering is the over representation of foreign born spanish speakers; but they lack the experience of growing up as a minority in this country and that makes them predisposed to dismiss the difficulties we experience in life as well as trying to get a foothold into this industry.