Might be hard to spot if you’re American in the US, but LLMs feel very American even outside of region and language. Concretely, I have to constantly ask for recipes to be changed to metric. Less concretely, the undertones and mannerisms of politeness, positivity and “excitedness” comes across as very American to me, probably even within the rest of the Anglosphere. How would I describe it? Maybe similar to how you’d feel about a mix of Ned Flanders, Ted Lasso and some Valley girl stereotype – im sure it’s a bit off putting also for many Americans.

I guess it’s training data but also heavily RLHF. I doubt that the trainers are aware of their own cultural biases and values, and they may not care. And why should they? In either case, from a thousand yard perspective, it’s probably an effective vector for spreading “American values”, if you will.