ChatGPT is turning into an unreal cultural chameleon

Nearly two years since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, I had my first true “wow” moment from the artificial intelligence frenzy.

Granted, I’ve been impressed by how chatbots can generate helpful responses and synthesise information. I’ve amused myself with some of the images I’ve created with various applications. But mostly I’ve approached AI with a healthy dose of scepticism, often seeing more hype than substance, and still finding it glaringly obvious when I am interacting with a computer and not a human.

ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode update began rolling out to paid subscribers last week.Credit: AP

Much of that changed when I spent the past week playing around with ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode update. The feature began rolling out to paid subscribers last week, after initial delays over potential safety issues. This week, OpenAI said it was launching its voice assistant to businesses and developers to use in their own applications.

This uncanny tool that can speak 50 languages with human-like candour has the potential to forever change how people around the world interact with AI. It also ushers in a new era of global labor market uncertainty.

The most jaw-dropping feat I encountered was how well it mastered cultural nuances and languages other than English. Various translation apps have been around for a while, but many still struggle with turning English into Asian languages compared to European ones. There have been improvements made over the years, especially in text-to-text translators. But ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode was able to seamlessly go back-and-forth between languages with live, human-sounding responses and minimal errors.

ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode was able to seamlessly go back-and-forth between languages with live, human-sounding responses and minimal errors.

I carried conversations with it in Japanese, and used it to practice my keigo, the trickier honorific form used in formal and business settings. It even passed my go-to test for automated Japanese translators, recognising that a traffic light flashes ao, or blue, and not green.

When I asked ChatGPT to help me learn Mandarin, it offered detailed feedback on my vocal tones. One China analyst observed that using it to practice spoken Chinese has been “nothing short of mind-blowing”.

My true wow-factor moment came when I asked it to speak to me in Hawaiian Pidgin, a creole language that emerged on the islands’ sugarcane plantations in the 1830s. I hadn’t heard it spoken since my late grandparents passed away roughly 10 years ago.

ChatGPT’s ability to seamlessly turn into a cultural chameleon was disarming, and it marked the first time I almost felt like I wasn’t just talking to a machine. I even caught myself responding as if it were a person, telling the tool “sorry to interrupt” and “thank you so much”.

It’s not just me. Advanced voice mode’s mastery of spoken dialects is bewildering. A Jamaican start-up founder shared a clip of himself conversing with ChatGPT in the local Patois. Videos have flooded TikTok showing the app speaking in everything from Singlish to African American Vernacular English.

ChatGPT’s ability to communicate in dialects opens the floodgates for more people to interact with and anthropomorphise the tool. It may all seem gimmicky, but anyone who has travelled far from home knows that language and culture bridge barriers. Hearing someone who speaks like you, in whatever language, instantly forges a sense of kinship.

For most of the internet age, this sort of cultural nuance was something that computers couldn’t yet capture, marking one of the biggest differentiators between friend or machine.

But there are potential consequences to using dialects with AI. A Nature study published in August found that large language models generate “covertly racist decisions” about people based on their dialects in a text-based experiment. The researchers found AI is more likely to suggest that users of African American English “be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death” compared with speakers of standard American English.

Separately, OpenAI has acknowledged how the audio capabilities, specifically, of its latest model could carry risks we don’t fully understand yet, such as people creating strong bonds or allowing for “increasingly miscalibrated trust” in AI models.

The company has noticed users tapping into the audio features using language that might indicate they feel connections with the model, saying more internal and independent studies need to be done to more “concretely define this risk area”. And the reason the chatbot now sounds so humanlike is partly because its nine voices are powered by real actors.

OpenAI has a slew of guardrails. ChatGPT answered a few questions I asked by changing the topic, saying its guidelines won’t allow it to respond. It can’t sing, impersonate people, or be overly flirtatious. The current version also stopped short of live translating something other than my own voice, such as a speech or video, possibly to avoid further copyright scrutiny. More eagle-eyed observers have been critical of its proficiency in certain languages and dialects. Due to regulatory hurdles, advanced voice mode is not yet available in the European Union and a few other markets.

There are tremendous potential upsides to ChatGPT’s new ability to shatter language barriers, for both businesses and people. But as mesmerised as I was this past week, every now and then I would get a response that would remind me it’s just an app — I shouldn’t assign it too much responsibility or see it as a human companion. I couldn’t help but worry for a future when people may forget that.

Bloomberg

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