ChatGPT responds to English queries in Welsh
English-speaking ChatGPT users have been baffled when the AI replied to them in fluent Welsh.
The glitch has appeared for numerous users and is thought to be a problem in the software of how the computer system identifies the language of the speaker.
The latest version of ChatGPT, made by the company OpenAI, builds on the previous chatbot-style design and is called ChatGPT-4o. It allows people to use audio and visual prompts as well as text.
It is this latest update’s voice interface that poses the issue as it is poor at recognising the Welsh language so occasionally can think it is being asked a question in Welsh, when it is in fact an English speaker interacting with the algorithm.
AI ‘hallucinations’
ChatGPT, and other rival forms of AI from tech giants Google and Meta, have long suffered with what experts call “hallucinations”, which are where the technology produces nonsense answers.
The language error is an expansion on this flaw, experts believe, which is rooted in the fact that the Welsh dataset the AI algorithm is trained on is itself made up of many English samples, leading to inferior ability to detect Welsh.
A system called Whisper is the voice transcription mechanism of ChatGPT and OpenAI told the Financial Times that users experiencing the Welsh issue should change the speech settings from “auto-detect” to English.
ChatGPT is now available in more than 80 languages including Basque, Macedonian and Montenegrin, but the company says Welsh performs worse than many other languages.
OpenAI was valued at $86 billion (£66.67 million) earlier this year and is the market leader of large language model (LLM) technology after launching ChatGPT in 2022.
A study last year found ChatGPT has “systemic” Left-wing bias and reflects the positions of Labour and Democrat politicians.
“These results translate into real concerns that ChatGPT, and LLMs in general, can extend or even amplify the existing challenges involving political processes posed by the internet and social media,” researchers from the University of East Anglia (UEA) said.