Apple research tackles the English accent of AI

Ask any non-native English speaker, and they’ll probably tell you that LLMs tend to perform much better in Shakespeare’s language than in their own Sometimes, the difference is subtle. Sometimes, not so much. Sometimes, it’s downright dangerous, as shown in this 2023 Carnegie Mellon study, which found that non-English inputs could more easily bypass safety filters. Now, Apple has co-authored a study proposing a new method that could close part of this gap. As Apple explains it: Current Large Language Models are predominantly designed with English as the primary language, and even the few that are multilingual tend to exhibit strong English-centric biases. Much like speakers who might produce awkward expressions when learning a second language, LLMs often generate unnatural outputs in non-English languages, reflecting English-centric patterns in both vocabulary and grammar. In other words, even when models generate Chinese or French, they still “think” in English. The result? Non-E ... Read full article.