As someone who, in a previous job, got to go to a lot of meetings where the European commission is seeking input about standardising or regulating something—humans also often do the thing where they just use the English word in the middle of a sentence in another language, when they can’t think what the word is. Often with associated facial expression / body language to indicate to the person they’re speaking to “sorry, couldn’t think of the right word”. Also used by people speaking English, whose first language isn’t English, dropping into their own lamguage for a word or two. If you’ve been the editor of e.g. an ISO standard, fixing these up in the proposed text is such fun.
So, it doesn’t surprise me at all that LLMs do this.
I have, weirdly, seen llms put a single Chinese word in the middle of English text … and consulting a dictionary reveals that it was, in fact, the right word, just in Chinese.
I suppose we might worry that LlMs might learn to do RLHF evasion this way—human evaluator sees Chinese character they don’t understand, assumes it’s ok, and then the LLM learns you can look acceptable to humans by writing it in Chinese.
Some old books (which are almost certainly in the training set) used Latin for the dirty bits. Translations of Sanskrit poetry, and various works by that reprobate Richard Burton, do this.
As someone who, in a previous job, got to go to a lot of meetings where the European commission is seeking input about standardising or regulating something—humans also often do the thing where they just use the English word in the middle of a sentence in another language, when they can’t think what the word is. Often with associated facial expression / body language to indicate to the person they’re speaking to “sorry, couldn’t think of the right word”. Also used by people speaking English, whose first language isn’t English, dropping into their own lamguage for a word or two. If you’ve been the editor of e.g. an ISO standard, fixing these up in the proposed text is such fun.
So, it doesn’t surprise me at all that LLMs do this.
I have, weirdly, seen llms put a single Chinese word in the middle of English text … and consulting a dictionary reveals that it was, in fact, the right word, just in Chinese.
I suppose we might worry that LlMs might learn to do RLHF evasion this way—human evaluator sees Chinese character they don’t understand, assumes it’s ok, and then the LLM learns you can look acceptable to humans by writing it in Chinese.
Some old books (which are almost certainly in the training set) used Latin for the dirty bits. Translations of Sanskrit poetry, and various works by that reprobate Richard Burton, do this.