Google Translate returns some very disturbing results when you type certain phrases

We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but, it looks like we're all doomed and will probably die soon. Yeah, sorry about that.

And, to make it worse, you're going to find out about the end of the world through Google Translate - yes, not quite as dramatic as the ten commandments on a stone tablet, but you've got to take what you can get.

This won't be the first example of AI taking a rather spooky turn for the worst. There have been reports of Alexa chuckling like a serial killer; spooky messages from online Ouija boards; and even robots simply starting to take over our jobs, so it looks like we're doomed anyway.

Now, Redditors have noticed a glitch in Google Translate, where if you type in 'dog' to Google Translate 19 times, you get this rather foreboding prophecy:

Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve. We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus' return.

Right... *backs away slowly*

Here's the evidence all captured in a video tweet by Twitter user Michal Dvorak:

If that wasn't spooky enough, if you type 'ag' repetitively and translate it from Somali to English (yep, we casually do that in our spare time, too), then you get some equally weird and worrying warnings for what can only be a warning for the end of times:

It continues.

Another Redditor tried repetitively typing 'prophecy' into Google Translate and also found some interesting results:

Same with 'dw'...

So, what's really going on here? IFL Science spoke to a specialist, Chris Boyd, security analyst at Malwarebytes:

Translate uses a neural machine translation reliant on absorbing huge slices of text in one language, alongside the relevant translation in another...

Languages which tend to have smaller amounts of translated texts to pair off against are generally the ones most responsible for the weirdest translations.

Google translate is doing what it can and trying to pair off against whatever texts it does have in those less common languages. 

This is where the potentially apocalyptic text comes in – religious texts including the Bible exist in all the languages causing the oddities, and this would potentially explain some of the more esoteric messages being fired out.

Only Google would be able to pin down the exact reason, but I don't think we need to run screaming into the streets just yet. 

Phew, we were getting seriously worried...

HT IFL Science

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