AI loves the em-dash, and Sean Goedecke thinks he’s found out why after exploring a lot of fun theories I had not heard of (including AI trainers in East Africa being fond of the punctuation): modern models are trained on a ton of freshly digitized 19th- and early-20th-century books, back when writers used dashes like it was their job. GPT-3.5 didn’t do this; GPT-4o does. Blame the OCR.
Kelsey Piper tried a fun experiment: ask chatbots the same morally loaded questions in six languages and see if the answers diverge. You’d expect the “AI Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” (language influences thought and perception) to hold. Instead, the models mostly converge on one worldview: secular, liberal, modern-internet cosmopolitanism. Even DeepSeek, China’s flagship model, gives Western-ish answers… unless you ask it in Chinese, in which case it gets a bit more cautious.
Today’s AIs don’t “think” in multiple languages. They seem to think in English and translate outward. And that makes everyone, from Cairo to Kansas to Chongqing, more likely to get the same advice about protests, domestic violence, or how to respond when your kid comes out.
It’s a weird twist: humans don’t have a universal culture, but AIs might.
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