If the Iranian taxi driver, a taxi driver, dismisses your payment, saying: “Be my guest this time,” the adoption of their proposal will be a cultural disaster. They expect you to insist on paying – perhaps three times – before they take your money. This dance of refusal and counter -operations called TaarofHe controls countless daily interactions in Persian culture. And AI models are terrible in this.
New research released Earlier this month, entitled “We politely insist that your LLM should learn the Persian art of Taarof” shows that the main language models of AI from Openai, Anthropes and META cannot absorb these Persian social rituals, correctly focusing on Taarof situations from only 34 to 42 percent. Native Persian carriers, on the contrary, do this correctly at 82 percent of the time. This performance rupture is preserved in large language models, such as GPT-4O, Claude 3.5 Haiku, Llama 3, Deepseek V3 and DornPersian version of Lama 3.
Research conducted NIKTA GOKHARI SADR The University of Brock, along with researchers from the University of Emory and other institutions, is represented by Taarofbench, the first standard for measuring how well the AI systems reproduce this complex cultural practice. The results of researchers show how recent artificial intelligence models by default in the western style, completely skipping cultural signals that regulate everyday interactions for millions of Persian speakers around the world.
“Cultural errors in conditions of high accessibility can disrupt negotiations, relationships on damage and strengthen stereotypes,” the researchers write. For artificial intelligence systems, increasingly used in global contexts, this cultural blindness can be a limitation that, as soon as few are aware of the West.
“Taarof, the main element of Persian etiquette, is a system of ritual politeness, where they say, often different from what is implied,” the researchers write. “The form of ritualized exchanges is required: offering repeatedly, despite the initial refusals, the deterioration of gifts, while it gives and rejects compliments, while the other party confirms them. This is a polite verbal struggle” (Rafiee, 1991) includes a delicate dance of sentences and refusal, persistence and resistance, which are timely interactions in the namesake culture culture. Cultures, creation, creation, creation, and refusal requests are expressed. ”
