Culture machines
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Rodney H. Jones
Abstract
This paper discusses the way the concept of culture is discursively constructed by large language models that are trained on massive collections of cultural artefacts and designed to produce probabilistic representations of culture based on this training data. It makes the argument that, no matter how ‘diverse’ their training data is, large language models will always be prone to stereotyping and oversimplification because of the mathematical models that underpin their operations. Efforts to build ‘guardrails’ into systems to reduce their tendency to stereotype can often result in the opposite problem, with issues around culture and ethnicity being ‘invisiblised’. To illustrate this, examples are provided of the stereotypical linguistic styles and cultural attitudes models produce when asked to portray different kinds of ‘persona’. The tendency of large language models to gravitate towards cultural and linguistic generalities is contrasted with trends in intercultural communication towards more fluid, socially situated understandings of interculturality, and implications for the future of cultural representation are discussed.
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special Issue 1 : Applied Linguistics, Ethics and Aesthetics of Encountering the Other; Guest Editors: Maggie Kubanyiova and Angela Creese
- Introduction
- Introduction: applied linguistics, ethics and aesthetics of encountering the Other
- Research Articles
- “When we use that kind of language… someone is going to jail”: relationality and aesthetic interpretation in initial research encounters
- The humanism of the other in sociolinguistic ethnography
- Towards a sociolinguistics of in difference: stancetaking on others
- Becoming response-able with a protest placard: white under(-)standing in encounters with the Black German Other
- (Im)possibility of ethical encounters in places of separation: aesthetics as a quiet applied linguistics praxis
- Unsettled hearing, responsible listening: encounters with voice after forced migration
- Special Issue 2: AI for intercultural communication; Guest Editors: David Wei Dai and Zhu Hua
- Introduction
- When AI meets intercultural communication: new frontiers, new agendas
- Research Articles
- Culture machines
- Generative AI for professional communication training in intercultural contexts: where are we now and where are we heading?
- Towards interculturally adaptive conversational AI
- Communicating the cultural other: trust and bias in generative AI and large language models
- Artificial intelligence and depth ontology: implications for intercultural ethics
- Exploring AI for intercultural communication: open conversation
- Review Article
- Ideologies of teachers and students towards meso-level English-medium instruction policy and translanguaging in the STEM classroom at a Malaysian university
- Regular articles
- Analysing sympathy from a contrastive pragmatic angle: a Chinese–English case study
- L2 repair fluency through the lenses of L1 repair fluency, cognitive fluency, and language anxiety
- “If you don’t know English, it is like there is something wrong with you.” Students’ views of language(s) in a plurilingual setting
- Investments, identities, and Chinese learning experience of an Irish adult: the role of context, capital, and agency
- Mobility-in-place: how to keep privilege by being mobile at work
- Shanghai hukou, English and politics of mobility in China’s globalising economy
- Sketching the ecology of humor in English language classes: disclosing the determinant factors
- Decolonizing Cameroon’s language policies: a critical assessment
- To copy verbatim, paraphrase or summarize – listeners’ methods of discourse representation while recalling academic lectures
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special Issue 1 : Applied Linguistics, Ethics and Aesthetics of Encountering the Other; Guest Editors: Maggie Kubanyiova and Angela Creese
- Introduction
- Introduction: applied linguistics, ethics and aesthetics of encountering the Other
- Research Articles
- “When we use that kind of language… someone is going to jail”: relationality and aesthetic interpretation in initial research encounters
- The humanism of the other in sociolinguistic ethnography
- Towards a sociolinguistics of in difference: stancetaking on others
- Becoming response-able with a protest placard: white under(-)standing in encounters with the Black German Other
- (Im)possibility of ethical encounters in places of separation: aesthetics as a quiet applied linguistics praxis
- Unsettled hearing, responsible listening: encounters with voice after forced migration
- Special Issue 2: AI for intercultural communication; Guest Editors: David Wei Dai and Zhu Hua
- Introduction
- When AI meets intercultural communication: new frontiers, new agendas
- Research Articles
- Culture machines
- Generative AI for professional communication training in intercultural contexts: where are we now and where are we heading?
- Towards interculturally adaptive conversational AI
- Communicating the cultural other: trust and bias in generative AI and large language models
- Artificial intelligence and depth ontology: implications for intercultural ethics
- Exploring AI for intercultural communication: open conversation
- Review Article
- Ideologies of teachers and students towards meso-level English-medium instruction policy and translanguaging in the STEM classroom at a Malaysian university
- Regular articles
- Analysing sympathy from a contrastive pragmatic angle: a Chinese–English case study
- L2 repair fluency through the lenses of L1 repair fluency, cognitive fluency, and language anxiety
- “If you don’t know English, it is like there is something wrong with you.” Students’ views of language(s) in a plurilingual setting
- Investments, identities, and Chinese learning experience of an Irish adult: the role of context, capital, and agency
- Mobility-in-place: how to keep privilege by being mobile at work
- Shanghai hukou, English and politics of mobility in China’s globalising economy
- Sketching the ecology of humor in English language classes: disclosing the determinant factors
- Decolonizing Cameroon’s language policies: a critical assessment
- To copy verbatim, paraphrase or summarize – listeners’ methods of discourse representation while recalling academic lectures
