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When “no” means “yes”: Why AI chatbots can’t process Persian social etiquette
New study examines how a helpful AI response could become a cultural disaster in Iran.
This 'polite verbal wrestling' (Rafiee, 1991) involves a delicate dance of offer and refusal, insistence and resistance, which shapes everyday interactions in Iranian culture, creating implicit rules for how generosity, gratitude, and requests are expressed." The language switch apparently activated different Persian-language training data patterns that better matched these cultural encoding schemes, though smaller models like Llama 3 and Dorna showed more modest improvements of 12.8 and 11 points, respectively. Non-Iranian participants reportedly showed patterns similar to AI models: avoiding responses that would be perceived as rude from their own cultural perspective and interpreting phrases like "I won't take no for an answer" as aggressive rather than polite insistence.
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