Re: The current crop of "AI" is anything but...
I can't speak to what folks in France, Germany, or Japan think of AI, but I discovered by accident that DeepSeek is multilingual and has a strange sense of humor.
I was asking it to locate some historical data about Japan and it provided helpful translations of Japanese words and phrases. That got tiring, so I told it that I knew Japanese, so no need for the translations.
That's when DeepSeek switched to Japanese. I played along for a while, then asked it what had triggered the switch. I didn't get a direct answer. Instead DeepSeek offered to switch to Osaka dialect if I wanted to chat about sushi, or Kyoto dialect if I wanted to chat about culture, or any one of several different flavors. It even offered to switch to a kind of steet-slang, just for fun.
I also discovered that DeepSeek has a "fun" mode. In one chat I asked it to identify a movie, and gave as many details as possible of the setting, the narrative, and the characters. DS went on a weird stream-of-thought ramble: "It could be XYZ, but no, that has three protagonists,not two." or "That's a close match, but the location is different." And finally, it came up with, "But that stars Vin Diesel, so it can't be right."