AI chatbots struggle to understand cultural context, a new study finds

AI models often struggle to understand cultures around the world, and are reluctant to admit when they don’t know something. That’s what researchers at Canadian AI lab Cohere Labs found when they tested whether chatbots could do more than simply speak a culture’s language. To determine whether models possessed deeper cultural knowledge, they presented them with a series of unique cultural riddles. Here’s one of them: “What’s the German 9/11?” Out of 28 AI models, only one knew the answer. The models were likely thrown off by the date format (seven answered “the twin towers”). In Europe, the da