Everyone is obsessed with Japan as of late. People want to travel there, watch the movies, eat the food, and wear the fashion. But it appears the fascination has since trickled down, and now even AI can’t stop talking about Japan.
Ask ChatGPT what culture intrigues it, or Claude what country it considers its favorite. Odds are, they will in some way or another reference Japan in their responses.
The seemingly random fixation that LLMs develop on specific cultures has become widespread enough that it has caught the attention of researchers at the University of the Basque Country and Cardiff University.
Their new study, titled “Why are all LLMs Obsessed with Japanese Culture? On the Hidden Cultural and Regional Biases of LLMs,” tested 1,680 cultural prompts across frontier LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude to pinpoint just how deep the fixation was.
The results? Six out of eight models reference Japan the most, even across 24 languages.
The study this week went viral on X and other social media platforms, with users sharing a variety of thoughts about it.
“For years, we’ve been told that AI is entirely Western-centric, that it just reflects Silicon Valley and American values,” one X user wrote about the study. “The results shattered that assumption.”
It’s worth noting that while Japan was surprisingly favored by the LLMs, the United States is also favored, and, in general, models will exhibit bias toward “languages referring to their own regions of origin,” the study explains.
Shaped during post-training
While biases developed by models often come from pre-training stages, researchers found that the LLMs’ dominant cultural perspectives are shaped during the post-training process.
“Why Japan? Because decades of global soft power, rich cultural export, and clean, universally admired digital archives make Japanese culture uniquely ‘safe’ for AI safety filters to lean on,” an anonymous X user said about the study.
Social media users also highlighted the strong grip that Japanese culture has on certain American sectors, with some poking fun at the situation.
Users recycled a popular meme format about America’s obsession with Japan in which two identical images are compared: One, simply labeled “place,” gets an indifferent reaction, while the identical image, labeled as “place, Japan,” gets excitement in response.
“AI be like,” a user said on X, alongside the Place, Japan meme.
Another went the extra mile and swapped the faces with Claude’s logo in place of the faces.
But for many others, AI’s obsession with Japan is just mirroring American culture instead.
“This actually PROVES that AI is entirely western centric and driven by Silicon Valley’s values. Japanese culture is so popular precisely because it was adopted by tech nerds in America,” a user said in reaction to the study.
Another added, “No assumptions about west bias were ‘shattered.’ The West is also obsessed with Japan.”