Why Hong Kong’s bilingualism is uniquely indispensable in the AI era

Last week, while preparing a lecture on the visual culture of the Global South, I caught Google’s Gemini in a double hallucination. Cross-referencing a historical event between English and Chinese data sets, I found the English AI to be authoritative but inventing citations. In Chinese, the fabrications vanished but so did global context, replaced by an insular perspective.

Disturbingly, the system cloaked Chinese content in English citations, creating a deceptive authenticity that made the hallucinations difficult to verify. AI claims to bridge all languages, but gaps remain. Knowing both sides is the only way to see them.

This systemic vulnerability is inherent in how large language models handle cross-lingual alignment. When bridging asymmetric data pools – the vast English web and the structurally distinct Chinese digital ecosystem – these models suffer from epistemic asymmetry. Instead of true synthesis, the system often takes localised, unverified Chinese content and cross-contaminates it with invented English academic sources.