Why Is Google Translate Making Apocalyptic Predictions About the Second Coming of Christ?

What in the world? This is very strange!

If you didn’t already know, Google has an amazing service called Google Translate. At no cost, you can get fairly good quality translations between about a 100 languages. The service doesn’t use humans to translate things in real-time, of course. Rather, it makes use of some of the world’s most advanced machine learning AI (artificial intelligence).

Which makes this next fact all the more strange: some bits of gibberish are being translated into strangely specific religious predictions about the end of the world, including the Second Coming of Christ.

Really.

Here’s an example:

Google Translate

If you try to translate the word “dog” repeated 19 times from the language Maori to English, you get this bizarre result: “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“.

You can see it for yourself here.

Some people have also gotten verses from the Bible out of gibberish:

via motherboard.vice.com

We have not been able to independently get the same results, though it’s possible Google has made a fix for these since they were first discovered.

So what’s causing this?

There are a few theories as to why this is happening, compiled by Motherboard and a group on Reddit dedicated to following this phenomenon called TranslateGate.

First, it’s possible some of this could be a joke intentionally programmed by Google software engineers.

Second, the software is designed to always give out some result. When you input gibberish, it doesn’t know exactly what to do and spits out a mostly random phrase or sentence from the vast oceans of data it has sifted through.

Third, it’s possible someone has been abusing Google Translate’s “Suggest an edit” tool, though at least one Harvard professor thinks it’s unlikely things like this would get past their filters.

So who knows! But whatever the cause, it’s just a mistake and isn’t really a prophesy.

Here’s an example:

Some people have also gotten verses from the Bible out of gibberish:

So what’s causing this?

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!