Kojima’s OD vs. AI’s Cultural Limitations

AI has little concept of other cultures

Source: REUTERS

Much like people after COVID, AI is unable to pick up on social cues. Specifically, social cues and cultural contexts of non-Western societies when using it to translate another language. 

Say you host someone at your house and ask them if they want chai, and then they (for whatever strange reason) say they don’t want any, you won’t just leave it at that, right? You’d ask if they want anything else. Probably tell them not to do takkalluf (formality) and just accept your hospitality, which is usually a decent move.

But according to research released earlier this month, the AI would simply leave it at that. This research was done on the Iranian tradition of respect and hospitality: ‘ta’arof’, but you can imagine that if it can’t do one culture, it probably can’t do others either. And it’s not a question of the AI being impolite. A study showed that Llama 3 was extremely polite in Western contexts, but could not replicate that politeness in a Persian/Iranian context. 

So in an effort to be polite and not be ‘pushy’, the AI would lose the cultural context and specific etiquette in translation, and you’d end up actually being rude.

I’m chalking this up to how AI models are usually trained on large, but specifically Western, datasets. For AI to become culturally sensitive, there’s a lot of work that’s left to do, and a lot of data that needs inputting. 

A first look at Kojima’s OD Xbox game

Source: x.com/KojiPro2015_EN

Hideo Kojima and Xbox just cranked the hype meter to eleven with a new three-minute teaser for OD, and it’s exactly the kind of deliciously weird, fear-soaked ride you’d expect. 

The trailer opens with ‘It’ star Sophia Lillis stepping through a crimson door, lighting eerie, baby-like candles (a wink to Death Stranding), while rain pounds and phantom knocks echo, pure Kojima horror vibes. 

Running on Unreal Engine (not Sony’s Decima), OD is billed as a genre-bending experiment, half game, half movie, that dares to test your fear threshold. 

Xbox boss Phil Spencer confirmed Microsoft’s deep technical support and teased that development is “well underway,” while Jordan Peele is quietly cooking up another piece of the OD universe.

No release date yet, but with Kojima promising bold innovation in story, gameplay, and immersion, OD already feels like the next big mind-bender to watch.