Matthew Sheffield
Another bizarre Grok Korean translation involving Tomodachi Life 🫠
Despite Grok embarrassing the company on a global scale with sex-themed translations involving the game, no one has added a parameter to Grok that 친모아 (Chin-mo-a) does not mean stepmother, it means Tomodachi Life.
A 🧵 on what happened and why these translation fails are actually important...
Matthew Sheffield
There's a lingering bit of Grok's "anti-political correctness" bias surfacing in its translation of "my period came."
The Korean does not in any way refer to menstruation.
정병 (jeongbyeong) is slang for "mental illness," and has nothing whatsoever to do with menstruation.
But given Elon Musk's "don't be afraid to be politically incorrect" rule for Grok and the incorrect "stepmom" translation, Grok's model assumed this was a woman complaining about being crazy from her period.
Matthew Sheffield
These gaming slang translation fails may seem small, but they're not.
They're a great example of what machine learning researchers have long worried about within translation & about generative models as a whole.
Everything is confabulation. It works most of the time because the statistical correlations are good. But when input gets into the "long tail," shit happens.
Matthew Sheffield
Grok's smaller Korean dictionary contains 친모 (chin-mo), which means biological mother.
The last character in the Tomodachi Life abbreviation, 아, "a," then gets confabulated to be a modifier of biological mother, and why chin-mo-a is converted to stepmother.
The model sees the extra 아 as a typo that is supposed to modify biological mother.
Matthew Sheffield
The phrase "친모아 하다가 정병옴" in the screenshots in my OP would be translated by a human as something like "Tomodachi Life has broken me," which matches the video capture showing characters doing a very bizarre and frustrating dialogue.
The translation should absolutely not be "while doing stepmom stuff, my period came."
Matthew Sheffield
Grok continually gets confused by the Korean slang for Tomodachi Life, even though it is very common at this point.
In English, Nintendo decided not to translate Tomodachi Life, but in Korean, the game was rendered as "Friend Gathering Apartment," or 친구모아 아파트, Chingumoa Apateu.
But people love abbreviating frequently typed proper nouns, so Korean fans did their equivalent of "FGA," Chin-mo-a, 친모아.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.