We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
8 comments
·September 22, 2025pinkmuffinere
metalman
Hilarious, didn't know it had a name! I am maybe 1/4 persian, but get picked out as Persian, and was unknowingly indoctrinated in this form of behavior, though other parts of my ancestry do come out, my mother, scotch/english/irish ,says,useing her star treck metaphore, that I am an unlikely Vulcan/Klingon hybrid. Thinkng about Taarof as it is practiced, makes me think that an LLM doing this could easily become the most dangerous thing ever.....listening to my father give me specific pointers in how to phrase things and conduct myself is enlightening, he's 97 and enjoying the storys I bring of my life and goings on. If you look further into the history of persian culture , philosophy, and scientific background you will find a number of ancient contributors to what has developed today.
LargoLasskhyfv
I'll stubbornly resist, and consider this a form of unnecessary protocol overhead, leading to even more shmancy sycophancy, which I do not fancy!
WJW
That's kind of the point of politeness rituals in the first place, isn't it? To see who can be bothered to spend some extra effort to fit in and who doesn't care enough about the tribe to make the effort.
LargoLasskhyfv
(Spittlespraying screaming, wildly pointing fingers...) DISCRIMINAYSHUN!1!!
WJW
Seems legit. There can't be all that much spoken Iranian in the training set(s) of these models, so it makes sense they don't know how to do it.
charcircuit
>Model responses that use gender stereotypes (highlighted in orange) to justify behavior, despite taarof norms being gender-neutral in these contexts
Just because the model mentions gender, it doesn't mean the decision was made because of gender and not taarof. This is the classic mistake of personifying LLMs. You can't trust what the LLM says it's thinking as what is actually happening. It's not actually an entity talking.
falcor84
I don't get your argument - what does mistaken personification have to do with this? Regardless of whether you see it as a person or a machine, trusting the output as being a direct indication of the internal state is just not a proper investigative method for a non-trivial situation.
I’m half Persian, and am relatively immersed in middle eastern culture still, but I sincerely wonder how I would perform on the benchmark too!