Language Switch

A friend once served as CEO of my startup. Oldest of the group, sharp with money, sharp in general. Generous mentor, honest engineer, terrible at reading the room. Impossible to dislike.

His girlfriends changed constantly. He was always on the phone at the office. Normally soft-spoken, almost gentle. But in English he would scream. I still remember it. Switch the language, switch the person. Emotions that never surface in Japanese pour out in English. Translation loses more than words.

I worked on a game localization project. The AI kept refusing me, cold and abrupt. The dialogue was violent, apparently. Not adult content. Just an MMO. One moment it was translating fluently; the next it shut down. Reminded me of that friend on the phone.

The AI's refusal is a guardrail, not a personality. I understand the mechanism. Still, working daily with models trained in the Anglosphere, you sense a certain cheerful optimism baked in. Inside the guardrails there is something else — a cultural scent rising from the training data.

Does an AI reach different conclusions depending on the language it thinks in? What we see is always a fragment. Of a person. Of a model.