Google Translate Keeps Spitting Out Creepy Religious Prophecies

Does a new trend involve goofing around with Google Translate show something silly – or sinister?
That’s what Vice wanted to know when they asked Google about something strange they had discovered: If you input random or meaningless words, the process doesn’t return gibberish back, but rather what appears to be knockoff biblical prophecy.
For example, typing the word “dog” 19 times and telling Google to translate it from Maori to English gives the following 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.”
And typing combinations of the letters “ag” repeatedly from Somali leads to references to cubits and “the Hebrew Nation.”
“This is simply a function of inputting nonsense into the system, to which nonsense is generated,” Google spokesperson Justin Burr said in a statement.
Harvard professor Andrew Rush told Vice that the results likely come from Google Translate’s “neural machine translation” system, which tries to teach itself to find corresponding words when translating one language to the other. When users feed in random letters, the machine still does its best to find some result that looks like normal English.
Another researcher, Sean Colbath, speculated that Google uses the Bible to “train” its model in the languages that often offer these results, like Maori and Hawaiian. These languages don’t have a large history body of written works with direct English translations to learn from — apart, perhaps, from missionary materials.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Most Popular
- 1
News School Israel trip turns ‘terrifying’ for LA students attacked by Israeli teens
- 2
Culture Cardinals are Catholic, not Jewish — so why do they all wear yarmulkes?
- 3
Fast Forward Why the Antisemitism Awareness Act now has a religious liberty clause to protect ‘Jews killed Jesus’ statements
- 4
Fast Forward Ye debuts ‘Heil Hitler’ music video that includes a sample of a Hitler speech
In Case You Missed It
-
Yiddish קאָנצערט לכּבֿוד דעם ייִדישן שרײַבער און רעדאַקטאָר באָריס סאַנדלערConcert honoring Yiddish writer and editor Boris Sandler
דער בעל־שׂימחה האָט יאָרן לאַנג געדינט ווי דער רעדאַקטאָר פֿונעם ייִדישן פֿאָרווערטס.
-
Fast Forward Trump’s new pick for surgeon general blames the Nazis for pesticides on our food
-
Fast Forward Jewish feud over Trump escalates with open letter in The New York Times
-
Fast Forward First American pope, Leo XIV, studied under a leader in Jewish-Catholic relations
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.